I laughed.
“You agree?”
“That’s what I was thinking of.”
“Between you and me,” he said. “We can both keep secrets, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Almost everything about me is a secret.”
He smiled. “There’s something so fresh about you,” he said. “As brilliant as you are, you still have this youthful spark. I can’t get over it.”
I looked at the table and sipped my Coke.
“What about Brian Buchman?” he asked. “Smart kid, right?”
“He is pretty smart.”
“Is he not the biggest ass-kisser in the history of academia?”
I laughed with glee. “I thought you loved him!”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, Camus is superb.”
“‘I found the French version to be far superior,’” I mimicked.
“Oui,” Harrison said. The waiter came, and I glared at him. His appearance was becoming an annoyance.
For all David said about my having a youthful spark, he seemed to have one, too, even though he was a well-respected academic. Some of his stories indicated that he was still just as insecure as he’d been growing up, which I liked. There was something else that was thrilling to me: We were laughing together about our class, as if they were below us and we were both high above them.
When the food came, David took his fork and pushed a little of everything onto my plate. “Eat up,” he said. “Don’t hold back. Enjoy yourself.” We ate greedily and took turns drinking from the next glass of wine. We giggled until we’d finished it. Then David ordered more.
We ate, we drank, we laughed, and I knew I was acting completely empty-headed and silly, and for the first time, I didn’t care. I was with someone brilliant, who could protect me if need be, and I wasn’t worried about anything.
As soon as we left, the cold air hit us. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll turn on the heat as soon as we get in the car.” He put his hand on my back for a second. A shiver went up my spine. All sorts of feelings darted through me, but they didn’t gel into a consistent whole. I was just feeling an amorphous anticipation. I didn’t know what to do with it, as it was new to me.
He backed out of the parking lot and I felt the heat come on. Through the windshield, in the dark, a row of pine trees looked like a spiky sine wave. A few stars were out. It seemed like we were a world away from campus.
“You know, you really make me feel at ease,” he said, pulling onto the road.
“I’m glad,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.
“It’s true.” He smiled.
“Are you usually not at ease?”
“I don’t know if any of us is usually at ease.” He looked at me for a second. Something made me shiver again.
David put the radio back on and told me how impressed he was with my knowledge of music. I mentioned my four years of piano lessons. I remembered that my father had put up a poster of Uncle Sam that he’d gotten from the local music store, and it read, “I WANT YOU to practice every day.” David talked about a recital he’d been to where his cousin had played Beethoven’s Fifth, and just as he’d gotten to the last note, a panel in the ceiling fell down, raining white dust on everyone. The way David described his cousin Stevie, in a little navy-blue suit and bow tie, which got powdered up like a jelly donut, I had to laugh. The two of us talked at length about good and bad childhood music experiences, about the odd teachers we’d had in our music classes in school and for after-school lessons, and about other extracurricular activities, and before I realized it we were back at my dorm.
I didn’t know what time it was. I’d had a lot of wine. I knew it must still be early, but it felt late. Only two or three windows were lit up. I sat there, feeling the alcohol wash through me. I waited for my eyes to focus.
“Well,” David said. “I had a nice time.”
“I did, too.”
“Got your keys?”
“Hope so.” I began digging through my purse.
David reached into my purse and grabbed my left hand. I looked up.
“Do you really want to leave?” he asked me.
He slowly began massaging my palm with his thumb, in a circular pattern. I returned to staring into my pocketbook.
“If you could do anything right now, what would it be?”
I knew he wanted me to be the one to suggest going somewhere else. If it was my idea, it would be less illicit. But I didn’t know what to say.
Before I could decide, he leaned over, put his hand behind my head and brougt his lips to mine. He stopped for a second and looked at me uncertainly. I turned to face him, and he kissed me again. I could hear the motor running. Soon he had his hand on the back of my neck.
Then he pulled away. “I told myself right after we had that talk in my office the other day that I wouldn’t let myself do this.”
He actually had been thinking about this since our talk the week before! And he hadn’t been able to resist! I couldn’t believe it. It was the first time I’d been wanted that much, and not just to be on someone’s spelling bee team.
“Look,” he said. “I can let you go, or we can go somewhere.”
I paused.
I had no choice. “Let’s go.”
He had some of the same paintings in his living room that I’d had in my bedroom growing up. Before I had a chance to tell him, he was walking down the hall, calling for me to come on a tour. His apartment felt like the warmest place I’d been since leaving home. There was a fireplace in the living room, thick rugs everywhere, and fat pillows smothering the couches and bed.
We didn’t linger in David’s bedroom. I followed him back to the kitchen.
“Anything to drink?” he asked, heading around the counter.
“I think we already did that,” I said. The wine had smoothed my speech, hammering out the kinks and stumbles.
David laughed, unscrewing the top of something. He poured himself a glass and set it down.
“Do you ever use the fireplace?” I asked, walking over and sitting on a corner of the couch. It was charcoal-gray, with light and dark areas where it had been rubbed.
“I haven’t yet this year,” he said. “I was waiting for the right inspiration.”
How’s it going to start, I wondered. Would he use a bunch of tricks that would get me into his bedroom? Or was that not going to happen? I was assuming it would, even if I wasn’t sure whether I wanted it to happen. He did know I was inexperienced, right? He had to. He couldn’t expect much. Then again, maybe he liked inexperience.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked. No one had ever done that before, simply asked me what was in my head. He put his now-empty glass on the kitchen counter and walked toward me. He looked serious and intense. I noticed a slight wobble in his step.
“Your syllabus,” I lied.
“Ah,” he said, sitting on the other corner of the couch. “That reminds me. I published a paper on Speech and Phenomena…” He began telling me about it, and I liked that in the middle of our sitting in the living room, work was still on his mind. It was strange, though, that after we’d been kissing in his car, we were back at the chaste distance we’d been at before.
I wondered if maybe he was going to tell me to sleep on the couch