Emily Howorth has published stories in Boulevard, Washington Square Review, Hobart, The Southeast Review, and other journals. She was a Rose Fellow at Texas State University and currently lives in Oxford, MS. emilyhoworth.com
The symptom that first brought my father to the doctor was vague: a heaviness in the side of his chest, close to his armpit, that ached at the end of the day. The doctor sent him home with a prescription for OxyContin. A few weeks later he began coughing up blood. Lung cancer: a sniper.
“Julia,” my mother said, a weekend I drove home from college that fall semester, “What will we do about the boys?” My brothers were eleven and nine. We, my mother said. She had never shied from summoning me to responsibilities beyond my age.
I was setting the dining room table, carefully positioning the dinner knives blade in, the way she had taught me.
“What have you told them?” I asked.
“Not much. They’re very hopeful.”
“That’s probably for the best,” I said. “What good is anything else?”
She poured wine and carried a roasted chicken to the table. My father came from the living room, pulling the oxygen machine behind him, its hum low and rollers rattling against the hardwood floor.
“How’s that liberal bastion you call a college?” he said. “What’s the latest indoctrination?”
My father was a newspaper columnist with a small syndication. He was celebrated among his readership of simple hard-working people as a straight shooter. He’d served in Vietnam and attended a regional university on the G.I. Bill. He felt as proud to send me to a liberal arts college as he did terrified I might major in English or philosophy.
I told him about my gender studies class. We’d learned that some babies were born intersex, and in the past the common practice was to perform surgeries aligning them one way or the other, with parents often never revealing the truth to their grown children.
I said to my mother: “If I’d been born that way, you would have had the surgery done.”
She laughed. “If you were born that way, I would have drowned you.”
“15,000 a semester,” my father said. “I could have bought a boat.”
Late that night my mother brought a bottle of wine to my room and poured glasses for us both. I was under the covers, reading an essay for class. I wanted nothing more than to be back at school, at a party being held at a house down the street from the apartment I shared with two other girls. But here I was, a good daughter, my little brothers sleeping down the hall, the peeling posters on the wall remnants of the fantasies of my adolescent self. On my bureau was a framed photograph from a fishing trip my father and I had taken when I was eight. In it we stood on a weathered dock, gray lake water rippling behind us, and I beamed and held a twenty-inch bass.
My mother stood beside my bed. She was purple-tongue drunk.
“It’s freezing. Can I get under the covers?”
I sighed and turned them down for her. Her feet, always cold, brushed against mine, always hot.
“I wish it were me instead of him,” she said, and started to cry. “I don’t want to be the one left behind.”
I realized she had not considered that I would be left behind either way.
I wished she would leave, but instead I let her curl against me.
. . .
My first impression of Professor Kerr, standing behind the lectern: a weirdly sexy Fred Rogers.
It was January, the first day of the spring semester; January, he told us, was named for Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways—a god depicted two-faced, because every door divides two chambers. The class was Late Antiquity through the Dark Ages. I was twenty-one, no virgin, but a good girl nonetheless—if a bit of a messy one—with bitten nails and circles under my eyes and a tendency to find myself in circumstances diametrically opposed to my intentions. I watched him move in front of the chalkboard, lightly, at a quick pace, his tall thin body sweeping the front of the room. His cursive on the board was as slender as he was, looped ts and ls stretching high. His shirt was pressed and cleanly tucked, and he paused now and then to rake back his dark hair, hand resting for a moment on his crown.
Even then I understood that a graceful man is a rare and beautiful thing.
I sat between two people: on my left, Lisette, from Columbia, the niece of some high-ranking military official. She had long brown legs and a faint accent, and she smoked Nat Shermans in the alley behind the building after class. On my right: Henry, a sandy-haired boy from Oregon who napped for a few minutes in the middle of each class, head bobbing.
I could not imagine falling asleep in his class.
In February he lectured about the rise of Christianity. We learned that early Christians practiced in secret, meeting in catacombs marked with the symbol of the ichthys. He spoke earnestly about religious persecution and the teachings of Jesus Christ. I began to notice and appreciate his finer details: the way he never got chalk dust on the back of his pants, like other professors, and spoke articulately and eloquently, never padding his pauses with filler phrases.
I wrote my first essay on narratives of martyrdom as a function of sustaining belief systems. When he returned it I flipped to the back to find his comments. I felt my heart radiate when I saw what he’d written in his elegant hand: Excellent insights. Come see me—have ideas for this. A.
Henry leaned over and looked at my paper. “Are you kidding me? I got a C.”
Lisette laughed and looked at us. Her laugh was crinkling and light, like a leaf skittering across a sidewalk. “I got a D,” she said. She shoved her books into her oversized handbag and stood, towering over us in heels. “Next time you’ll read mine?” she asked. I said sure.
I gathered my books and headed toward the front of class, considering what to say, but panicked and turned down my eyes. He called out my name and smiled when I looked up at him.
“Come to my office hours,” he said. “Four o’clock.”
. . .
The history department was located in a red brick Victorian with a turret, and within that turret there was a winding staircase. I climbed the stairs and found his door, Professor James Kerr, the letters scored out in a brass nameplate. The door was open a small crack, but I knocked nonetheless, making a light rap against the wood. I heard his chair roll away from his desk, and within a minute he was in front of me, opening the door wide.
“Julia,” he said. “I’m so glad you could make it. Come on in.”
I sat in a small chair placed in the corner, and he moved back to his desk. I noticed he had taken his glasses off; his nose had small imprints on each side where the frames had rested. He had unbuttoned his shirt, too, at the neck, and the next button down. The collar of his white undershirt looked slightly worn and ragged, a sharp contrast to the iron-pressed shirt. I found it hard to determine his age. His face had few lines and his hair was full and free of gray, but I figured he had to be at least forty. Up close I confirmed what I had thought sitting in the back of class: He was a very handsome man.
His small office had a large window with a set of Venetian blinds pulled up, letting the sunlight wash the room and illuminate scattering clouds of dust. His old wooden desk held tidy stacks of papers, arranged in a neat line, and a desktop computer. On the corner of the desk sat a picture in a wooden frame of a beautiful blonde woman holding a baby and a young child; his family, I assumed. While his wife’s smile seemed approachable and friendly, her eyes were lowered slightly in a manner that seemed sensual or perhaps even sexual: an odd choice of a photograph for a professor to place on his desk, I thought, but then again, the expression was vague, my interpretation of it possibly colored by my attraction to him.
“What inspired you to write this essay?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.” I swallowed and collected my thoughts. “It struck me that martyrdom narratives are everywhere we look, even today, in movies and in books. They represent the ultimate form of heroism. No different for the early Christians. These were the stories that inspired them and sustained their beliefs, even under persecution.”
“This essay is very smart,” he said. “You seem to have a good grasp of the significance of historical context in our reading of these narratives.”
I tried to mask my pleasure at hearing his compliments.
“There’s a prize given by the department every spring. It comes with a small scholarship—not much, but it might be enough to cover your books for the fall, and more than that it’s a star on your record. I think with a little revision this essay could compete. It’s very, very smart.”
My thank you came out like a question.
“See if you can read my comments and come back with a revision next week. The deadline for the prize is at the end of the month,” he said.
I nodded.
“You might elaborate on the part where you discuss the methods of martyrdom,” he said. “Fascinating stuff, if a little dark.”
He paused for a moment. “Where are you from?”
“Outside Clinton.”
“Clinton.” His voice brightened with recognition. “Great town. Great apple-picking.”
“That’s what we’re known for,” I said.
He turned to his computer, and I gathered my books. I paused by the door. “Professor Kerr?”
He looked up.
“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me.”
“It’s a pleasure. I want to help you. You’re doing great work.”
. . .
When I got home to my apartment, I found a message from my mother on the answering machine. She told me my father had an infection and would need to go to the hospital in the city overnight. Could I come home and watch the boys?
I sighed and called her back, said yes, and packed my bag and my laptop. The drive home took two hours. When I arrived I found my father lying on the wicker sofa in the back sunporch, his face damp with sweat from running a fever. Before he quit cigarettes, the sunporch had been his space, a place where he could steal some of the house’s central heating and air while smoking and writing his columns, neat whiskey at his side. He had won a few awards for his journalism, and he displayed them on a small table beside his desk. Now his place to rest, the room smelled rotten, like spoiled linens and summer garbage, sickness. I sat beside him and touched my hand against his forehead. His eyes looked distant and delirious, but he focused on me and said my name. I never called him Daddy anymore, but I did then.
“Chin up,” he said.
My mother spoke from the kitchen. “I don’t know what we would do without you, Jules.” She came to my father’s side. “We’re going to be late,” she said. “Do you need help getting up?”
“Can’t a cancer patient get a break?” he said. He hoisted himself upright. “I’ll do it.”
My mother turned to me. “I didn’t get a chance to make anything for the boys. Be a dear and do something with vegetables, please.”
After they left, my brothers asked if they could play video games. I made pasta and searched the kitchen for something healthy for them. Finally, I found a sodden zucchini in the crisper, salted it, chopped it, and sautéed it with onion. After dinner, while my brothers watched television, I pulled out my computer and logged into our college’s journal database to research methods of martyrdom: staked to the cross, buried alive, tortured by fire, shackled to the Catherine wheel. I revised my essay, turning now again to his comments—Excellent Insights. Come see me—and remembering his empathic words as I had left his office: I want to help you.
My father returned home infection-free two days later, and I kissed him and said goodbye. Back on campus, I went to the library and scoured the religion and history sections. I worked on my essay for a few hours each day, my thoughts focused on little else. Even as I went about my day and sat in my other classes, I carved my ideas into ever-sharper spurs. On Friday I brought him my revised draft, four pages longer with citations running two pages long. I climbed the winding stairs to his office and found him sitting in front of the computer with a cup of coffee resting alongside his neat stacks of paper. The cup sat on a little white napkin that had collected the muddy ring of a spill. He looked tired, and I could tell he hadn’t shaved that morning. I felt myself growing red as I imagined what it would feel like to brush my hand over his stubble or run my fingers through his dark hair. As I sat in the small corner chair, posture my straightest, he took off his glasses and read the essay, his elbow on the desk, chin cradled in hand, his long beautiful fingers curled against his jaw.
“This is brilliant,” he said. “Brilliant.”
He got up and closed the door.
For an hour we talked about my essay and martyrdom. I devoured his praise.
On the way home, dizzy, I tripped and skinned my knee.
. . .
In March we began the Crusades. We learned about the dual perspectives historians held about the wars: Some considered them a Christian conquest to obliterate Muslims, pagans, and heretics; others, the defense of lands seized by these forces. Either way, millions of battles were waged and thousands of lives lost. We learned about the black plague and the belief, commonly held at the time, that only God’s wrath could cause such a gruesome epidemic.
I watched Professor Kerr move around the classroom and felt I had fallen in love with him, even though I knew that to love someone you do not know is at best a fool’s errand and at worst an exercise in masochism. I vowed to write an essay even better than the one I had written before. I would be his star pupil, his achievement to boast about in years to come. I selected my clothes carefully on the days of his class, wearing smart-looking outfits with provocative tones so muted that I could, if called out, deny any accusations of being salacious; I sought to become the ambiguous hint of sexual threat glimmering in his wife’s expression in the photo on his desk. One day I wore a pair of dangling silver earrings—men were like babies, as I understood them, always grabbing for shiny things—and received a compliment from Henry, who up until that point had only talked to me to complain about his C. In the past a compliment from a boy like Henry might have made me nervous, but instead I smiled and said thank you.
The picturesque beauty of our campus was at odds with the nihilistic spirit of our student body. We were known for sunbathing topless in the Quad, for dropping acid under the canopies of weeping willows. At the center of campus was a manmade lake surrounded by cherry trees, and each year at the end of May, the final day of classes, we had a celebration on its banks, reveling under fireworks. The library was a nineteenth century neo-Gothic building with dark labyrinthine corridors and dusty moldering volumes. I made it my habit to visit it regularly. I sat underneath a stained-glass window depicting roses and virginal maidens, my textbooks and library books spread before me.
I decided to write my essay about sex in the Middle Ages. I learned that the Christian church had prioritized carnal positions in order of deviance, with the missionary position being the style most God-sanctioned, and each progression toward the bestial bringing the sinner one hot stride closer to damnation. My mind wandered between my research and my thoughts of Professor Kerr. I constructed elaborate seduction fantasies about him, yet even in my imagination I refused to consummate any act darker than the morally gray.
Lisette, my neighbor in class, asked again for my advice on her paper. I invited her to my apartment one Thursday night. My roommates and I had turned our kitchen into a living space, dragging the table out and replacing it with a worn-out loveseat. Our kitchen had a sliding glass door we used as a main entrance. Lisette came in, took off her fur-trimmed parka, and crammed it down in the crevice between the loveseat and the door.
All she had prepared for her essay were two pages of handwritten notes.
“I find the whole thing rather boring,” she said. “Crusaders, wars, blah blah.”
I pressed her and she said she would write about the ruthlessness of Richard the Lionhearted, about his desire to be immortalized. She would dissect both his viciousness and his magnanimity. I told her I thought it was excellent.
“We’ll see if I get around to writing it,” she said.
We drank wine out of coffee mugs and I found myself admitting my crush on Professor Kerr.
“Professor Kerr?” Lisette laughed. “With his button-ups? And those loafers?”
“He’s smart,” I said. “And anyway, he’s not interested in me. He’s just a good teacher.” I told her about the picture on his desk, the smoldering look in his wife’s eyes. “I would never be with a married man,” I said.
Lisette laughed again. “I don’t think you’re as innocent as you look.” She gathered her hair into a loose bun, revealing her slender neck. “I was with a married man once. I was the au pair. They put me in a little room down the hallway from the children. He would sneak in after his wife had gone to sleep and fuck me for hours.”
I didn’t know what to say. Finally I asked, “Didn’t you feel bad for the wife?”
“She was a cold fish. People deserve good sex.” She crossed her long legs and lit a cigarette. I thought of my dad but did not ask her to stop. I myself had smoked up until the day he received his diagnosis.
“So are you going to go for it?” she asked.
“What?”
“Professor Kerr.”
“No,” I said. “Even if he wasn’t married, there’s his reputation. It’s too tawdry.”
“Too bad,” Lisette said. She blew smoke towards the ceiling. “I would love to hear the stories.”
. . .
My bedroom door had no lock, so at night I put my chair in front of it to stop my roommates from entering without knocking. My fantasies of him were vigilantly protective; if I alone acted, he could remain technically immune from any wrongdoing. My first and most regular fantasy placed us in his office—me sitting in my corner chair, him behind his desk, eyes shut—as I slowly read passages of my essay to him, lingering on descriptions of sex acts. I imagined bringing him close with my words alone. Or I saw myself opening his fly and going down on him, but not before placing his hands on the arms of his chair and holding his wrists there for a moment, as if to say: You don’t need to touch me. I will do all the touching. My desire circled around his pleasure alone, on pleasing him alone.
. . .
My father’s health continued to deteriorate. Chemotherapy left him bedridden and weak, and my mother’s anxiety approached hysteria. I decided to come home every weekend for one night. I packed my bag on Thursdays so I could be ready to leave after my Friday classes ended. The drive was a clean shot down a four-lane highway, and at first I sped to make good time, but I soon found myself making stops along the way. One overcast Friday I stopped at a gas station and bought Red Hots and a Sprite and lingered in my car, motor running, listening to the radio. I arrived in Clinton after dinnertime and took a detour through town, driving past my old high school and the house where my first boyfriend lived, the place where I had lost my virginity, in the wood-paneled basement, my blood smeared on the old sheet covering the futon. Afterwards his family dog, having fished through the garbage, upchucked the condom on his brother’s bedroom floor.
My ex-boyfriend attended the local community college and still lived at home. I parked across the street and watched the windows in his house light up as evening fell. I wanted to knock on the door and find him there. I remembered the way he had touched me, tenderly that first time, and later, the way I’d squirmed when he’d pulled my hair. I thought of Professor Kerr and wondered what he liked.
I stumbled into my parents’ kitchen past nine.
“Where have you been?” said my mother.
“I had a meeting with a professor,” I said.
“Your father’s sleeping. We had an appointment with the oncologist today. It’s not good.”
Starved, I warmed a can of soup and pulled a block of brie from the refrigerator. I cut big pieces and ate them sitting on the counter. I wanted to eat myself sick. I did not want to hear about my father’s appointment.
“I submitted my history essay for an award,” I said. “My professor thinks it could win. It’s about martyrdom and torture in the Middle Ages. Have you ever heard of a Catherine wheel? It’s this sick and twisted device that allows someone to bludgeon you to death by breaking all the bones in your body.”
My mother took the cheese from my hands and wrapped it in Saran Wrap. “The doctor says they’ll need to wait on the radiation,” she said. “He’s too weak from the chemo. The worst part is they gave us an estimate.”
“I’ll find out at the end of the semester if I won. There’s a cash prize and you get your name on a plaque. My professor really liked the essay. He called it brilliant.”
She caught my gaze and held it. “Six months,” she said.
“Six months? Really?” I felt my stomach churn.
“Six measly months.” She shook her head and walked out of the room.
I rinsed my bowl in the sink and went to my bedroom. When I couldn’t sleep, I thumbed through an album of old photographs, trying to remember my father as a healthy man. When I still couldn’t sleep, I pressed my face to the sheets and brought myself off.
. . .
In the morning I sat with my father on the sunporch. We played Some Girls and looked at the yard. The daffodils were pushing up through the earth, their tender green shoots ready to announce spring. It seemed cruel that they should represent rebirth so nakedly in his view. I brought him pillows from the hall closet and propped them under his head. His hair had once been thick with salt and pepper curls; the chemo had thinned it to a few spare tendrils.
“The trip to Bonnell Lake?” he said.
“I caught a twenty-inch bass.”
“My little fisherman.”
“And later that day I got bitten by Uncle John’s terrier.”
“But you didn’t even cry.”
“How about the time you drove me to Camp Wanataka?”
“You wanted me to drive home when you realized you forgot to pack your red swimsuit.”
“You didn’t let me. I had to wear the ugly one all summer.”
“It’s important for children to learn there are consequences to their actions.”
“Isn’t it also important for them to learn they can get what they want, if they fight hard enough?”
“You know I love your mother, don’t you? Even if she is a crazy wench.” He coughed and turned his head away. “I’m sorry we fight so much in front of you.”
“It hasn’t been so bad.”
“You’re a good kid. You’re going to be fine.”
I wanted to tell him no, I would not be fine, I still needed a father. But I could not deny him the peace of believing I was ready to live without him.
“Is it really painful, Dad?”
“Pain is part of living,” he said. “I’ll take six months of pain over the alternative.”
I went to the stereo and turned up “Beast of Burden.”
I drove back to school and wandered around my neighborhood in the early hours of the night, looking for someone, anyone. I wanted to feel the heat of young bodies and get drunk enough to forget my way home. I found a group of boys playing beer pong in their driveway and went inside the house to find the keg. The music playing was not the kind I liked, but I sat next to the speakers to feel the bass pounding.
. . .
When Professor Kerr returned it, the comment on the bottom of my essay said only Come see me. I found myself rehearsing our conversation, my hope mixed with jitters. I imagined he would tell me again that my essay was an example of excellent scholarship. I would demur, but he would persist.
I dressed carefully before I went to visit him. At the last minute, choosing between a pair of studs and the silver dangling earrings Henry had complimented, I chose the dangling ones, thinking that if Henry liked them, he might, too.
When I got to his office I found the door closed. I sat on a bench in the hall and waited. I pulled out a book I’d been reading—one I hoped might impress him—and did my best to look intellectual. When the door opened, Lisette came out, her face doughy and tear-strained. She looked scattered and disheveled.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fucking asshole,” she said. “But it’s my own fault.”
I assumed she had gotten another bad grade—that she’d waited too long to write her essay, as she’d said she might.
“I’m sorry.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, collected herself, and smiled. “Let’s get coffee sometime,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “I’d like that.”
As she left I stood, went to his closed door, and knocked gently. When he saw it was me his expression folded into a pitying look that confused me.
“Come in,” he said.
I sat in my chair. His desk, so tidy in the beginning of the semester, had become a disorganized mess. Papers were spread in loose piles. His shirt pocket was stained with the ink of a leaky pen. I wondered what had happened to make him change so much; he was still graceful, but rougher now, messy. There was a hint of stale smoke in the room and I noticed he had cracked the large bright window. I wondered if the smell had come in on Lisette’s clothes, in her long hair.
“This essay isn’t as strong as your last one,” he said. “In fact, it’s got some serious flaws. I didn’t want to upset you by writing comments. I thought it might be better for us to meet to discuss it.”
I felt my heart start to race.
“The thing is—and please don’t take this personally—it’s often difficult for undergraduates to write about sex.”
I became aware of my dangling earrings. I wished more than anything that I had worn the studs. I felt humiliated to have imagined I might interest him, that I was anything more than a child to him. I looked behind him then, out the window, and steadied myself for his criticism.
He excoriated my argument and schooled me on the research I’d missed. I’d fallen into several logical fallacies, he noted, and relied on general ideas instead of getting into the thornier nuances of my topic. I didn’t seem to understand the historical context of the material and the significance of religious fervor in the Church’s prohibitions.
He sighed and said again, “Sex is difficult for undergraduates to handle.” He shrugged. “It’s more of a graduate-level thing.”
I sat with my head tilted, hoping he might throw some small scrap of praise my way. In the end the one he tossed me was not what I’d been hoping for. “Lisette mentioned you helped her with her essay. I’m glad you’re working together.”
When I got home I took off the silver earrings, thought about throwing them out, and instead tucked them in the bottom of my jewelry box, thinking one day I might forget this episode and wear them again. I busied myself with schoolwork and called my parents to see how my father was doing. Late that night I drank a pint of vodka, passed out, and woke up with a hangover like a hundred needles staked in my eyes.
The next time his class met, I kept my head down, taking notes, until I heard Henry make a comment in which he managed to confuse both the Dutch and the Germans and the Black and Baltic seas.
I heard myself laugh mercilessly—a bright slap on Henry’s face. He flushed red and I stuttered an apology. I looked at Professor Kerr, expecting a chastening expression, and instead saw the corner of his mouth curled into a nearly imperceptible smile, his eyes locked on mine and lit with recognition.
Henry swallowed, squared his shoulders, and came right back, launching into a series of eloquent and well-considered points about our assigned readings for the day.
I realized it then, watching Henry recover: A little humiliation can be a powerful motivator.
. . .
Our final essay had only one requirement: It had to be about hell. I decided to write about the life and work of Hieronymus Bosch.
We had a weeklong Easter break in April, and I used it to go home. I loaded my car with laundry and books and prepared to be my mother’s servant for the week. Instead I found her mellow, spaced out on Klonopin, her high-strung anxiety mutated into a humming calm that was either Zen or defeatist—I couldn’t tell, and figured it made no difference anyway. My father had grown emaciated. I could see his sharp clavicle outlined under his shirt, and his shoes slipped off his feet. Even my young brothers were no longer oblivious. They walked around looking like miniature men, faces scrunched and serious.
“Julia,” said Luke, the younger one. “Will you keep coming home, even after this?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll be home all summer, too.”
“You should have fun,” said my mother. “Take out loans. Go to Europe.” Her hands were deep in the sink, the water soapy, and she moved them slowly. “Maybe someday I’ll go to Europe.”
I spent the days sitting with my father and listening to him tell stories about his past. He had never been willing to say much about Vietnam, but now the tales came tumbling out: A soldier in his troop, a boy from Oklahoma, who hanged himself with a jungle vine. The Vietcong he’d killed. A whore in Saigon. A three-legged mongrel they’d fed and pet until they couldn’t keep him anymore, who’d refused to stray when they tried to turn him loose, whimpering back again and again until they had no choice but to shoot him.
“He was a smart dog, too,” he said. “We taught him how to shake. That’s a hard trick for a skinny dog with three legs.”
Stories from his childhood, too: his mother’s meatloaf, his sister’s scorched perm, and his first job, working at a tackle shop. The urgency with which he delivered these stories suggested he felt his time slipping away more rapidly than even we did. I loved hearing him talk but also wanted to tell him my stories, my memories. Still, I figured what I wanted mattered little in comparison to what he needed, so instead I took my memories to the places I could relive them alone. In the shower, in the car, I choked and wept and pitied myself for the things I would never experience again. I would never eat cereal around the kitchen table with him. We would never watch another bad movie and make our own Mystery Science Theater 3000 jokes. I would never see him at the bottom of the stairs, shutting out the lights, calling up to me to say goodnight.
To distract myself I worked on my essay. I felt at once furious with Professor Kerr for injuring my pride and determined to prove myself to him. The reading material I’d consumed over the semester tumbled in my mind, sparking connections that surprised and motivated me. I noticed that The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things was arranged in a circle like the Wheel of Fortuna, the medieval concept symbolizing the role of chance in life’s course. Each of the seven sins took a sector, as if to suggest the spinning wheel might land at random on one of them for all of us, that we might be born innocents simply waiting to be damned to lust, gluttony, jealousy, sloth, greed, wrath, or pride. I loved the imps and demons depicted in the bottom left scene of hell, the nun bludgeoning a man’s rear as a winged creature held him down. I decided I would show Professor Kerr my resilience by visiting his office hours as soon as I got back to campus, and I drove back on Sunday with a ten-page draft completed. I printed out images of the paintings I’d written about in my essay and tacked them to my bedroom walls.
“This is good,” he said. “This is quite interesting.”
“I’m not sure about the part about imagery in The Garden of Earthly Delights. What do you think?”
In truth I regarded this passage as the strongest in my essay.
“I think you’re onto something,” he said. “You capture the intersection among the triptychs. You’re analyzing something about why we regard this time period as the dark ages. The deformities and representations of wickedness in all the panels, even the one depicting Jesus, seem to suggest what Bosch may have seen as the blurred boundaries between good and evil, how even in paradise we are tethered to wickedness.”
I loved hearing him echo my ideas in his eloquent phrasings, which were far more beautiful than what I had written. I wanted to perch on my little corner chair for hours.
“Which parts could be stronger?” I asked, grasping for an opportunity to draw him out.
He hesitated. “I wondered about your claims about Bosch’s madness and personal darkness. We don’t know much about his life. It’s helpful to separate the artist from the painter. You might look at another one of his works—Cutting the Stone.”
“I will,” I said. “Thank you.”
“I’m eager to see your final draft.”
“I’m enjoying writing it,” I said. I gathered my books and stood to leave. “I love your class. How did you become such a good teacher?”
He laughed. “Oh, I’m sure I’m not that good. But when a student comes along ready to work hard for me, I find it very rewarding.”
I smiled and turned to open the door.
“Listen,” he said. “At the end of the semester my wife and I hold a little party at our house and invite a few rising seniors. I don’t know if you know—she’s in the art department. We don’t have the space to invite everyone, so it has to be kept a little quiet. We’d love to have you. I’ll have the date pinned down soon.”
“Thank you,” I said, and felt a quickening in my feet.
“Do you think you’ll be able to make it?” he said, and shrugged. “Headcount and all.”
“I hope so,” I said. “It might depend on the day. Sometimes I go home on the weekends. My father is very sick.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “And I’m even more impressed by the work you’ve done. Most students flounder under circumstances like that.” He turned to his computer and looked at the screen, started typing. “I hope he’s doing better soon.”
. . .
May arrived and our campus grew gorgeous, all blossoms snowing and pink sunsets. Students brought blankets and guitars out to the Quad and plucked flowers from the beds outside the library. As happened every spring, I had insomnia, struggling each night to fall asleep and waking early each morning from vivid dreams. I used the early hours to do my schoolwork and take long walks around the campus lake. In the early morning, the only sounds were the songs of birds and the scratches of squirrels as they clawed up the trees.
Professor Kerr and his wife scheduled their party for a Saturday night. He circulated his address to ten of us. Too curious to wait to see his house, I drove by it one evening. It was a white bungalow with green shutters and a glossy black door a few blocks from campus. The picket fence and perfectly edged lawn reminded me of his crisp shirts and the tidiness of his desk at the beginning of the semester. It was hard to picture him mowing it—the fresh clippings stuck to his ankles, the sweat dampening his chest.
I got a call from the chair of the history department, Professor Millard, the Tuesday before the party. He told me I had won the prize for my essay on martyrdom and would get my check and my name on the plaque. Giddy with pride, I called my parents.
“How much is the check?” said my mother, her voice a Klonopin drawl.
“Two hundred,” I said.
“That’s not very much,” she said, and I thought I heard her dropping something on the floor.
“Can I speak to Dad?”
“Yes. But I’ll have to wake him.”
“Don’t,” I said. “I’ll call back in a little while.”
I decided to visit Professor Kerr’s office in person to tell him about the award. I tidied my room and changed from jeans into a shift dress and a pair of sandals with a low, stacked heel. I considered wearing the dangling silver earrings again and decided against it.
After an hour I called my parents’ house again. My father’s voice was bright when he picked up the phone. “Mom told me the good news,” he said. “An award-winning writer. A chip off the old block.”
“My essay was about the significance of martyrdom narratives. I wrote about the torture mechanisms and the universality of the—”
“Sounds very practical,” he said. “Fifteen k a semester.” He started coughing.
I didn’t respond.
“I’m just teasing you, kiddo. Writing skills are essential these days. Good for you.”
A pat on the head for a good girl. I cleared my throat. “There’s a plaque I’ll get my name on, too.”
He was quiet.
“I know it’s a bit cheesy.”
“My name is Ozymandias,” he said. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
“Dad! Come on.”
“Are you coming home this weekend?”
“I don’t know. There’s a party I might go to,” I said. “I’ll see you soon anyway. The semester’s over soon.”
“I understand,” he said.
“I’ll be there with you all summer.”
“I can dictate my stories to you,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Maybe we’ll do that.”
“I love you, kid.”
In childhood I had compulsively told my parents I loved them whenever we were about to part, afraid they might die in an accident and not have these final words to comfort them. But now I withdrew, withheld.
“Goodbye, Dad,” I said.
. . .
I walked across campus to the history building and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The sound of my heels clapping against the treads made me feel like an adult. I hoped Professor Kerr would be proud of my success; I was eager to share my satisfaction with him. When I reached his door I softly knocked and waited. I thought I heard talking. When there was no response, I pressed my ear to the door.
I heard Lisette’s lilting voice, her soft accent. “Do you like it?” she said.
A conference about her essay, I figured. She would not mind me interrupting—I could share the news with them both.
When I opened the door I saw him behind her. Her body was bent over his desk, her skirt hiked around her waist, the papers on his desk scattered about. He had one hand on her shoulder blade and the other winched around the back of her neck. Her head was turned, the side of her face pressed down against the desk. They froze.
I expected him to panic, to stutter. Instead his eyes moved slowly down my body and back up, searching me, until his eyes met mine. Lisette lifted her head and looked at me, too, her eyebrows arched.
“Julia,” she started. “It’s not what—”
“Whore,” I said, and turned around and hurried down the stairs. At the bottom of the steps I slipped and caught myself on the handrail. I took off my shoes and ran barefoot through campus. I had never been a good runner, but I felt myself sprinted along by adrenaline. It was only when I reached the gate to town, to cross the street and walk back to my apartment, that I put my shoes back on. The soles of my feet were dirty and sweaty.
When I got to my apartment I poured myself a drink and shut myself inside my room. I looked at the Hieronymus Bosch printouts I’d taped to my walls. I noticed details I had not yet analyzed: the phallic knife with ears scuttling through the triptych’s hell-scape and the rats in each panel. The streak of lightning against the dark sky in Cutting the Stone. I went to my computer and opened my essay to write. If Lisette could entice him with her body, I could seduce him with my mind. I felt foolish for the protective fantasies I had entertained. I had imagined him a faithful husband and myself the temptation of transgression. Now, in revenge fantasies, I hoped he and Lisette would share venereal diseases. I hoped they would get caught, and he would get fired. I considered writing a letter to the dean or calling his wife anonymously. I imagined burning his house down.
Then I closed my eyes, remembered the sight of them together, and admitted to myself that I wanted him to touch me.
. . .
I skipped my classes for the rest of the week and lazed around watching television. Against my best efforts, I found myself conjuring the memory of Lisette’s long legs and slender neck. I wondered what else they had done with each other. I decided I would go to his party and force them to look at me. I hoped I would make them squirm by reminding them of what I had seen. I wanted an opportunity to study Lisette and dissect her flaws, and I wanted to look at him the way he had looked at me.
At night I fantasized about what it would be like to be with him: to feel the jolt of his fingertips trailing my inner arms, to taste the salt in his sweat.
The evening of the party was warm enough to leave my jacket at home. I steeled myself in red lipstick and motorcycle boots and decided to walk to his house through campus so that I could drink to oblivion if I chose so. As I left I noticed a message blinking on our answering machine. It was my mother, and her tone was urgent. She said she was at the hospital; my father had fallen in the bathroom and been knocked unconscious. He was awake now, and soon they would move him out of the ICU, but could I come be with her?
I slammed my fist into the wall hard enough to make myself yelp. I went back to my bedroom, packed my bag to drive to the hospital, and then went back to the kitchen to make something to eat before the drive. There behind a head of cabbage, rolling around the vegetable drawer, I saw it: an old shriveled zucchini.
My mother could wait until tomorrow. She could handle it on her own. I threw my backpack on the loveseat and left the house. I wished my father didn’t have cancer, I wished I’d gone home for the weekend, but more than anything I wished I had not checked my messages.
The path to Professor Kerr’s house led me past the library and around the lake. As I passed the lake, I saw Henry. He was walking with his arm around the shoulders of a short girl with glasses. They sat down on one of the benches facing the lake and kissed. Henry’s sandy hair caught the light of the setting sun and shone as brightly as the ripples in the water. After a minute, he leaned over, picked a few dandelions, and gave them to the girl.
I picked up my pace and arrived at Professor Kerr’s house around seven. I let myself in the little gate and walked up the flagstone path to the shiny black door. The entryway looked freshly swept and the planters were potted with bright annuals in freshly turned soil. Professor Kerr’s wife opened the door and offered to take my purse. She introduced herself as Gail. In person, she was even more beautiful than the photograph on his desk, with clear green eyes and marble-carved cheekbones. Her smile was warm and open, generous. Even knowing what I knew about his indiscretion, it seemed impossible to pity someone so beautiful. I wondered why he would bother with Lisette.
“I’ve heard all about you, Julia,” she said. “James says you’re one of the best students he’s ever had.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thank you?”
“Help yourself to some wine and food. It’s in the living room.” She was trying to scoot me towards the back of the house, but I lingered.
“You’re an art professor?”
“Yes,” she said. “James told me you’re writing about Bosch.”
“I would love to ask you some questions.”
“We’ll have time. Please, go on and see everyone. I know James will be happy to see you.”
In the living room, I recognized a few students from our class and others I had seen passing on campus. Lisette sat in a corner, far from Professor Kerr, who was sitting at a table speaking with two boys from our class. I tried to catch her eye so that I could give her a dirty look, but she kept her gaze down. The large room had white walls hung with oil portraits. In the corner there was an upright piano with dollar-store devotional candles burning on top. The woman on the stereo was singing in a different language—Swedish? Dutch? I couldn’t tell. I poured myself red wine and decided not to eat.
“Julia,” said Professor Kerr, seeing me from across the room. “Julia, Julia, Julia. The winner of the essay prize. Millard told me.”
He smiled and gestured toward an empty chair next to him. It was as if he had no recollection of what I’d seen in his office. I sat down and pulled my chair tight under the table.
“I’m proud of you,” he said. “Brilliant girl.”
I love you, I thought.
I could tell he had been drinking. He told us stories about his time in graduate school. He said he’d once had a professor who had said to him, If you replace every “this” and “that” in your essay with “shit” and “fuck,” you’ll see how truly obscene your writing is. About a professor who insisted on pronouncing European last names with comically precise diction. About another professor, a woman with dyed red hair, who always wore black dresses and high heels and scribbled so zealously on the blackboard she broke pieces of chalk every lecture. One time a stray chunk had whacked him in the back of the head.
Under the table I pressed my leg against his. When he didn’t respond, I moved it away. A few minutes later I pressed it against him again. This time he rested his hand on my knee. I watched him, waiting for him to look at me, but he kept telling his stories and locked his gaze on the boys. After a minute he slipped his hand between my thighs and then pulled it away. Fervid and itchy, I drank quickly.
Soon Gail came into the room carrying a plate of fruit and cheese. She put it on a table, sat next to Lisette, and they began to talk quietly. I marveled at how composed Lisette was, sitting there next to his wife. What a sly bitch, I thought.
We listened to him tell story after story until he stood up. “Taboo time,” he said, and went to a small closet. He brought out the board game and explained the rules to us. We would partner up and take turns guessing the word on our partner’s card, who would try to convey the word without mentioning any of the prohibited words listed below it.
“Gail and Julia,” he said. “Lisette and me.”
Lisette looked up, surprised, and came to join us. She looked uncertain. I felt jealous he had chosen her to be his partner; of course he would pick his girlfriend. I felt my resentment grow. I was determined to beat them. I crossed my legs and smiled at Gail. We waited for the egg timer to turn and she went first.
“Tree,” she said.
“Bark,” I said. “Pine, needles, chainsaw!”
“Yes!” she shouted, and threw the card aside. “Litter.”
“Trash,” I said. “No—puppies.”
“My god!” she said. “Flowers in the—” she said.
“Attic.”
And on we went, on fire, until the end of our turn.
Lisette and Professor Kerr went next. She scrunched her face and studied each card. Her suggestions came out with timid pauses.
He ran his hands through his hair in frustration as he guessed. “Peanuts? Nihilism? Detergent? Jesus, Lisette.”
At the end of their turn Lisette stood up and hurried to the bathroom. I could see she was about to cry. I sensed my opportunity.
I knocked softly on the door. “It’s Julia,” I said.
She let me in. She was sitting on the closed toilet seat, eyeliner running.
“It’s just a game,” I said.
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s just a game.”
I crouched beside her and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “You’re so pretty,” I said. “I see why he likes you. But it’s funny, you know—that night at my house. You made fun of him.”
“Yes,” she said. “I did.” She rubbed her running nose with the back of her hand. “I can’t stand being here.”
“Maybe you should leave,” I said.
“You don’t understand,” Lisette said. “You’re the one who should leave. Find Henry or something like that.”
“Henry?” I said. “I barely know Henry.”
“You shouldn’t be jealous,” she said. “You’ve got something I don’t have.”
She envied my intelligence, I figured. “You and I could be partners next round,” I said.
“Don’t you get it?” she said. “He could have guessed my words. He didn’t because he wanted to make a fool of me.”
I laughed. “I’m sure that’s a very comfortable way for you to look at it.”
“God, I thought you were nice.” She got up to leave. “Fuck him, fuck you.”
After she left I washed my hands. I twisted the tap off and thought about my father falling in the bathroom at home. I had a vision of him there, lying on the floor, his emaciated body curled on the tile, his mouth agape. I gave myself a thorough questioning: Hadn’t I gone home every weekend? Listened to him tell his stories? Let him tease me about my essay prize? I shook the water from my hands and went back to the living room.
The crowd had thinned; Lisette had left, and a few others. I saw Professor Kerr standing by the fireplace, his dark hair swept back, and he gave me a brief glance. I was remembering the weight of his hand on my knee and wondering if I could pull him aside when Gail came into the room and my confidence wavered. I asked her where she had put my purse.
“Yours is in our bedroom,” she said, “but please don’t go yet. We haven’t had a chance to talk about art.” She touched my elbow and guided me toward another room—her studio. The smell of turpentine made me dizzy. The room had two large windows and canvases propped against the walls.
“I love Bosch,” she said. “There’s no one like that today. We’re too afraid of the human condition.”
“I’d love to see your work,” I said.
She showed me a still life and a painting of her children. “They’re at my parents’ this weekend,” she said. “It gives us some freedom.”
“They’re beautiful,” I said, and I meant it. They looked like cherubic duplicates of their parents.
She led me to the back of the room. “Mostly I do nudes,” she said. “Although I don’t really think of them as nudes. It’s not about the bodies, I mean.” She pulled out a canvas that showed an older woman sitting on a crate, her posture slumped and her arms bound behind her. Her eyes were sad and full of light. Another showed a woman climbing a tree, her legs clamped around the trunk and back arched.
The last painting showed an androgynous figure with light brown skin and long legs. She was strapped to a pole and had a row of arrows puncturing her side. Her beautiful face was twisted in ecstasy or excruciation: Lisette.
“Saint Sebastian,” Gail said.
“Oh,” I said. “I really should go.”
Gail looked at me, eyes slit. She bit her lower lip and put her hand on my arm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Let me get you another glass of wine. Stay here and look around.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Here,” she said. She reached into the pocket of her cardigan. “Cigarette?”
I took the cigarette and let her light it. As I looked at the painting of Lisette I started to panic, but the nicotine eased me. Gail had captured Lisette’s beauty well. I was not as tall and my skin was not as clear. I envied her taut stomach and gazelle-like limbs. Finally I remembered how Professor Kerr’s words had made me feel like a child during our conference: Sex is difficult for undergraduates to handle. It’s more of a graduate-level thing.
I would show him what I could handle.
Gail came back into the room and gave me the wine. “Come,” she said. “Everyone has left.”
She led me upstairs to their bedroom. The room was painted scarlet, and against one wall there was an antique sofa upholstered in velvet. She kissed me and pulled me toward the bed. Her mouth tasted like tannins and apples.
Professor Kerr came in behind us and closed the door. He unbuckled his belt, untucked his shirt, and sat on the sofa. His face was ragged with drunkenness, yet even in his wrecked state I found him beautiful.
“Sweet Julia,” he said. “What a good girl you are.” He smiled. “Do you know what Julia means?”
“Young,” I said. “It think it means young.”
“Does it?” he said, a smile on his face. “Does it really?”
“There’s only one rule,” Gail said.
“What?” I asked.
“He doesn’t touch you,” she said. “Only I touch you.”
I thought of his hand slipping between my thighs under the table, of Lisette bent over his desk.
“Oh,” I said. “Yes. I understand.”
I kissed her again and let her undress us both. Looking at her naked, I saw the stretch marks on her stomach from pregnancy, ruptured tiger stripes faded to pale pink. Her breasts were soft and spread wide when she reclined. He watched us from the corner, opening and closing his eyes, his hand concealed in his briefs. Watching him watch us, my body quivered. I trailed my fingertips down her stomach and looked first at her flushed face and then at his, searching for his reaction, mutely preoccupied with the shape and bend of my body, unable to reach abandon. His face belied nothing more than distant damp voyeurism, his eyes trained on our bodies. I wondered if he felt as trapped in his mind as I did.
With my hands and my mouth I made her come and then offered my body to her. She felt me with strong bony fingers, her knuckles hard inside me. My hot feet grew tangled in the twisted sheets; finally, I closed my eyes, gave myself over to her, and panted until I cried out. When I finally came, my orgasm was too sharp to be pleasurable. I looked over and saw him watching me, his eyes once again bright and focused, the corner of his mouth curled into a smile I recognized.
I gazed at him and saw he was not altogether bad. He was something different, subtler, a slow poison: as close as you could be to being bad while still seeming okay. The infection from a papercut that spreads the length of your finger.
Gail brought me a glass of water. She smoothed my hair and rubbed my back.
“I liked that,” she said.
“I did, too,” he said, and zipped his pants back up.
“I hope you’ll stay the night,” she said. “It’s dark out there and you’ve had a lot to drink.”
The idea that I might leave had not occurred to me. I said sure, of course.
She brought me an old t-shirt to wear, and he went to the hallway. He came back carrying a sheet and blanket and made up the sofa for me. I could not imagine Lisette had ever slept on their sofa. I felt indignant but too drunk to do anything but surrender. As I lay down the room started to spin, so I dropped my foot over the edge and planted it there, a trick I’d learned to halt the spinning. I thought I smelled some remnant of spunk.
“I hope you’ll be comfortable,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek.
I woke up hungover at five a.m. and stumbled to their bathroom. I turned on the light and filled my glass with water. They had a double sink vanity like the one in my parents’ master suite. Then I saw it, sitting beside one of the sinks: a box of Grecian formula. I grew nauseated and decided to sneak out. I gathered my things from the floor of their bedroom, dressed, and eased the door shut behind me.
It was still dark outside. I walked across campus toward my apartment. A net of pain throbbed in my head and the nausea of my hangover amplified the scents around me. I gagged at a whiff of dog shit and at the pesticides sprayed by the landscaping team. My pulse beat hard in my hands and my chest, and I marveled at the paradox my father had suggested as he lay on the couch on the sunporch: that sometimes we feel most alive in pain.
I realized my father was a brave and honest man.
I passed the campus lake and took a detour down to its shore. I took off my shoes and dipped my feet in the cold water. I looked out at the ripples and remembered seeing Henry picking a fistful of dandelions for the short girl with glasses. The red sun was rising over the hill to the east, the light dawning.
When I reached my apartment, I went to my room and looked at the Bosch paintings again. I saw the naked revelers straddling beasts in The Garden of Earthly Delights and the image of pride in The Seven Deadly Sins and the Last Four Things, a woman regarding herself in a mirror held up by a demon. We had learned in his class that pride was the sin God most abhorred.
I noticed the flashing light on my answering machine. I looked at it and saw I had gotten seven messages overnight. I wondered when they had come in—while I was with Lisette in the bathroom, while I smoked in Gail’s studio, while I lay naked in their bed, or curled on their sofa?
I reached for the button and steadied myself.
Then the room spun out and everything inside me broke.
•
