In the cloud of rumors and allegations engulfing him, I discerned the outline of a kindred spirit. The stern language of the university’s sexual harassment report, the annual email from the campus women’s group warning about the dangerous criminal law professor . . . I confess all this only intrigued me. No one offered concrete details, just a ceaseless murmur of conclusory phrases like “unwanted advances” and “sexual harassment.” I wanted to believe other women, but they were giving me very little to work with. Nor could I subscribe to the infantilizing notion that hitting on your graduate students was a serious offense. Perhaps a minor misdemeanor.
I even suspected this vilified figure might be someone like me, someone determined to rescue life from the pitiless reign of professionalism. Was E* truly a villain or simply a human sacrifice in the bureaucratic war on Eros? Sources predating the scandal revealed uncanny similarities between us: an undergraduate thesis on the death drive, a taste for the same French novelists, an utter disdain for authority . . .
When I first saw him in that somber hallway outside his office, I couldn’t help staring. This was the sinister man feared by generations of women? He was a creature of short stature and slight build, apparently arrested mid-metamorphosis from man to skeleton. There was not a spot of fat on his haggard face, only skin that sagged under his eyes in protruding semicircles, giving him an extinguished air that even his immaculately tailored suit could not dispel. A sprinkle of trimmed, ashen hair had persisted, but his complexion was that of a corpse.
“Are you waiting for me?” he’d asked when he opened his door and noticed me on the bench opposite it.
“No,” I said, not quite believing that we had spoken to each other. He nodded and walked on.
I would glimpse E* again several times over the next two years, usually at the far end of a dark hallway, invariably walking with one of the conservative male students who had flocked to him after the scandal. He was often sniffling into a tissue from some mysterious cold, evidently unversed in the mannerisms befitting a villain. I could never master my curiosity enough to look away, but neither, it seemed, could he, and so an unbroken current of eye contact would pass between us while the student tried to recapture his attention with a question of staggering erudition.
Despite my immense curiosity, I avoided E*. I avoided his class on criminal investigations, though it was the subject I was most interested in learning. Perhaps I feared harassment, though the women who’d taken his classes in recent years hadn’t experienced any of the “attempted kissing” or “unwanted touching” of arms and waists reported during the scandal. Perhaps I feared social censure for appearing to disregard other women’s discomfort. But I feared most that he would prove too similar to me, that I would enjoy talking to him.
This good sense prevailed until my final semester, when I enrolled in his class with considerable misgivings. I was surprised to find gender balance and even political diversity among the students. And I was forced to concede he was a talented instructor. But for months, I scribbled my notes and went home. As I had no career aspirations, I had no need of his connections or mentorship, and I declined countless chances to talk to him. Even at a party hosted in his own home, I didn’t say a word to him, which was perhaps exceptionally rude, but he never held it against me. I marveled at the other female students who chatted easily with him, while I could only brave a fleeting moment of eye contact and an understated smile.
Was I afraid of him or myself? By taking an interest in him, I might mire myself in exactly the kind of narrative I was meant to have left behind. I was no longer attaching to people who would disappoint me in the most banal and predictable ways. This included (1) men, (2) married people, (3) professors, and especially people who combined these unfortunate qualities.
So I don’t know why I went to his office hours that first time. Maybe to smooth over my incivility in his home. (Or maybe I’d unconsciously been rude to create a reason to talk to him.) Not only was I afraid of enjoying his company, I was afraid of validating him, of letting an unknown man see he had interested me. I probably told myself I was just going to resolve questions about the course material: I was going to use him, not be of use to him. But as soon as I stepped from the shadowy corridor into the soft sunlight of his study, my curiosity about the course material vanished.
On seeing me, he offered an incriminating grin: So you’ve finally sought me out. His face, like mine, was hopelessly expressive, which perhaps explained why he’d abandoned a short-lived career in acting. Whenever he called on a relatively pretty woman in class (and his standards were very forgiving), a poorly suppressed smile would flit across his face. Once, when he noticed me observing him before he’d started lecturing, he smirked unabashedly in plain view of 40 people.
“So how can I help you?” he asked as I took a seat opposite him.
Having discarded the idea of discussing the course, I found I had absolutely no script for this encounter. I became a fountain of spontaneity. “Well,” I said, “I was going to ask you about criminal law. But I learned you’re interested in psychoanalysis, and frankly I am much more interested in that.” The word “psychoanalysis” clearly astonished and delighted him.
“Are you thinking of becoming an analyst?”
“No,” I said. “No, definitely not. I lack the requisite patience.” He laughed deeply, and I later learned his mother was an analyst.
“Then what’s your interest in psychoanalysis?”
“Literature,” I said. “The pleasures of interpretation.”
“Same.” He smiled. A few years ago, this would have touched me. But that was before D*, my last disillusionment, admitted that his love for Anna Karenina had been “an excellent card” in his seduction of me. Now, I was far from convinced, and I did not return his smile. Instead, I kept silent to invite free association.
“I actually wrote my college thesis about psychoanalysis,” he said. I made an interested sound, as though I hadn’t known. “I argued that psychoanalysis overstated sexuality as the central force in the unconscious mind.”
This was a common critique, but rather original from the only faculty member to be suspended for sexual harassment. “Right,” I said, “for some people it’s the central force in the conscious mind.”
He laughed loudly and looked at me with a much too pleased smile.
“Actually,” I said, “I think the sexual language of psychoanalysis is alienating if read literally but makes sense symbolically.” For example, if you read all mentions of “libido” as “curiosity” . . .
“So read in a more . . . literary way?” he asked.
“Exactly!” I said, forgetting not to smile.
“So then why’d you go to law school?”
The answer was embarrassing: I’d actually believed I could become a practical person. But I chose criminal law because it seemed the most literary and psychological.
“That’s why it appealed to me too.”
“But now I’ve worked on a range of criminal cases, and I have to say these criminals are not as inspired as I’d hoped.”
“You’re interesting,” he mused with undisguised surprise. I had expected more artistry from such a notorious flirt, but he repeated this five or six times during our conversation.
In fact, I shared his surprise at the way I was speaking to him. I was unfailingly polite and unassuming with strangers. I certainly didn’t use this low, unimpressed voice or regard them with cynical amusement. Even more astonishing was that he not only allowed this but enjoyed it. He seemed to welcome any impertinence provided it came from a young woman. The great irony of his cancellation by women was that no man had ever been fonder of women or more prepared to be abused by them. Perhaps his submission was an elaborate ploy to make me believe he was harmless. But this was hard to believe because it demanded more subtlety and impulse control than he displayed at any other point in our acquaintance.
With the respectable scripts abandoned, I too found myself governed by impulse. I knew my insolent behavior and amused expressions could be misinterpreted as flirting, for who among us can ever see past our hopes? But the conversation swept us along. How did we slip into such a candid exchange, covering everything, roaming everywhere, slipping so easily into self-disclosure?
When he learned I was working on several writing projects, he smiled playfully and said, “Well, if you’d like someone to read them . . . ”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
He merely laughed and continued his campaign. “I’m sure I’d love it,” he emphasized. “You’re just afraid I’ll judge you.”
“That’s not what I’m afraid of,” I said irritably. I would have been, had I any faith in his taste. What really worried me was the implication that I respected his opinion, not to mention the opportunity it gave him to see me clearly, perhaps more clearly than I saw myself.
Someone knocked on the door. A conservative student here for his office hours appointment.
“Ah,” said E*, glancing at the clock, “we’ve really gone over time. But you have tocome back next week.”
“It’s hardly in my control,” I said to avoid any suggestion of enthusiasm, and E* looked at once perplexed and amused.
“There’s a Darwinian competition for office hours around here,” I explained.
“Well,” he said with a conspiratorial grin, “I do have some control over this.”
The beginning of every relationship that intrigues us is like its own little explosion of a new universe. An ever-expanding universe of analysis and imagination augmenting each other. It’s true E* hadn’t said anything particularly interesting, but he’d appreciated my being interesting, so surely he had the potential to be interesting? . . . No, that was precisely the kind of fallacy I was supposed to have outgrown. Yet here I was, leaping again to infer rare spiritual depth from a few biographical coordinates — his acting career, his college thesis on self-destruction, his dramatic downfall by fatal flaw. Just as I’d once thought C* capable of great feeling simply because she was a scholar of French literature and psychoanalysis. (An error as devastating as it was, in retrospect, hilarious.) How had this brief encounter with E* stirred up all my old delusions? I’d spoken to him with the absurd confidence that I already knew everything there was to know about him and was simply waiting for reality to confirm my knowledge. But wasn’t that the deadliest illusion of all? Just another weed in the feminine heart that demanded constant vigilance . . .
I cannot deny the unexpected burst of sensuality that the idea of E* unleashed within me. I was shocked by the irrepressible playfulness of my eyes. Instead of the timid courtesies of an introductory conversation, ours followed the strange logic of dreams, where the impossible is accepted without question. We met on that surreal plane that alone made sense to me but where hardly anyone else seemed to travel. I laughed like a lunatic as soon as I walked past the line of students that had gathered in wait outside his office, laughed as I walked home in the enlivening cold, in my bed as I tried to fall asleep. I was assailed again by all my old delusions: the hope that someone might value me for the nobility of my soul or prefer an unimpressed, frigid woman to an affirming, sexually available one. But I was smarter now, and these desires returned more as highly amusing jokes than genuine hopes. I was no longer the ridiculous little girl, the Flaubert or Stendhal protagonist who imagined she could bend the world to her will. But she threatened to return at any moment and required ruthless surveillance by the cynical woman.
E* offered the cynical woman an irresistible game. A chance to prove I was no longer capable of attaching to an inadequate object. He was the perfect opponent, a grandmaster with 40 years’ more experience. And he was a man, so I could release my full aggression since there was neither a duty to provide a compassion that he could scarcely imagine nor any possibility of truly hurting his feelings. (Ironically, it was my misandry that made me susceptible to men.) And I could be confident around men because they lacked real discernment.
I was at no risk of caring too much for him (surely?). I simply wanted to unravel his psyche and observe his game. But as I recalled our conversation, I was dimly aware of deemphasizing in my memory all the parts where I’d been kind and flattering. Like when he’d confessed that writing a crime show was the most fun he’d ever had, though the result had been “cringe,” and said he hoped to do it again someday. I’d found this endearing in spite of myself and reflexively assured him that he could do so if he wished, though I suspected his name had been too disgraced. Was there any corner of the world where a woman could escape compassion?
I could not find it in myself to flatter him by approaching him after our first conversation, but he soon wrote to ask whether I would like to return to office hours, assuring me there was “zero pressure” to do so. He admitted he would schedule office hours for others that week only if I proved available. When he extended a two-hour window that very afternoon, I saw I was “just a student” in his mind, an insignificant little creature expected to work around his schedule. I feared the narrative would collapse into banality before it had even begun. A fear heightened when he confirmed one time and then asked to meet an hour later. Clearly, something more important had come up and he did not care to hide it. As usual, the other did everything possible to puncture the illusions spun by the imagination.
We met the following week. I arrived in time to overhear the last of E*’s previous appointment. Post-discipline, the door of E*’s office was never entirely closed when he met with students, making it possible to overhear everything. A student was earnestly plying him with questions about the course, intent on seizing any advantage possible in the curved class.
As soon as I entered, E* appraised me and said, “I really need a coffee.”
“We can get one in the dining hall.” I couldn’t understand why he was wasting our time discussing logistics.
“Really?” he asked. “You don’t mind being seen with me?”
This hadn’t even occurred to me, but I was surprised he’d acknowledge his reputation so bluntly when projecting confidence and imperturbability would have displayed much better game. So he lived every moment with the horrifying consciousness of provoking disgust.
“I don’t mind,” I said, “but do you want to be seen with me?”
“It’s no problem for me.”
“Are you sure?” I smiled. “I have quite the reputation.”
E* laughed and looked strangely touched. Why had I had the sudden impulse to be kind to him?
As it turned out, the dining hall was closed, so E* led me to the faculty lounge. It became clear that this was a last resort. He checked his watch. “The faculty meeting will be over,” he mused, “so I can go in to get coffee.”
“So you purposely schedule your office hours during faculty meetings.”
“Yeah. I used to go to every one of these for twenty years. I was a responsible citizen. But now . . . ”
So he could not face his colleagues. Somehow, I began to feel sorry for him — for a man — even though he obviously felt sorry for himself. He was not the formidable opponent I’d imagined. Maybe he didn’t contest my insolence not because he was so desperate to seduce me but because he now feared offending a female student in any way. To take advantage of such leverage would have been not only cruel but also unsporting.
I would perhaps never see the real E*, the person he’d been pre-discipline, before his confidence was destroyed. But I caught glimpses. In the charismatic way he asked you questions about yourself, immediately following up each of your answers with new questions, as if genuinely fascinated.
He wanted to know what I was doing after graduation.
I was going to be a cog of capitalism and pay off my debts.
“So you’re not looking forward to it. What would be your dream job?”
“A dream job,” I repeated. “What an idea.”
“You don’t care about power and status like your peers, so what do you care about?”
“Gathering material.”
It was so pleasurable to keep answering his questions, to keep intriguing him, but I refused to surrender to unilateral questioning.
“Why did you go to law school?” I asked.
“I loved the law,” he said, then added, “I’m sorry.”
“But why?”
“I thought it offered a coherent system for thinking about good and evil. I . . . no longer think that,” he added darkly.
“But why did you care so much about good and evil?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know.”
He laughed without mirth and looked away from me. At the pale blue walls, out at the street of soiled snow. “Maybe being the youngest child . . . but I didn’t need morality to defend myself. I always did better than my siblings in school and sports.”
I was disappointed by his obvious desire to impress and his equally obvious ineptness at doing so. It seemed he would never say anything sincere or interesting, just mock me with canned theories he did not even pretend to believe.
“You don’t care about good and evil?” he asked.
“Only as a constraint, not as motive.” Though for three irretrievable years, I had tried to prioritize morality, setting in motion the regrettable chain of events leading to law school.
“How’d you do that? You were a spy, weren’t you?”
“No,” I said. I considered it, then repeated, “No.” Quietly organizing a union was hardly espionage.
“Then?” he pushed. Why had his mind leapt to spy? Was he paranoid that all women were out to get him? Was he afraid that I was an operative sent by the campus feminists to expose his failed rehabilitation? Or had he finally decided to display some game?
“I mean, there were undercover operations. But none involving state power.”
“Well, now you have to tell me.”
I smiled blandly. “I’m being as forthcoming as you are.”
He laughed defeatedly and looked away. “So not very.”
No, these criminals were not as inspired as I had hoped. I had the feeling that E* was just like D*, exhilarated by my intensity but unable to endure it. Men loved to breathe me in for an interval like a purer air, reassure themselves of their sensitivity and depth, and then return to their comfortable lives worshipping status and inertia. I was the alpine sanatorium that allowed them to return rejuvenated to productive society. I was the loved and hated doctor who revealed the pollution clouding their lives. And I was the only patient who successfully resisted discharge.
I didn’t sign up for E*’s office hours the following week, and he didn’t reach out to me. I didn’t look at him before class, though a friend told me he kept looking at me. He had chosen to be unadventurous; he no longer concerned me. Whatever life I had hoped to find in another, I would yet again have to imagine myself.
But the hopeless little girl was full of self-doubt. Was I being unkind, trifling with him? Was I too insensitive to the reasonable fears he must have of letting his guard down with female students? Was I too impatient and cold to establish the trust that would allow him to do so? Wasn’t the only way to win the trust of a criminal to compromise yourself? Had I lacked game?
More self-blaming nonsense of the feminine heart. If I’d caused him any disappointment at all, it was the disappointment of not being able to trifle with me. We were the same. Two people who wanted to play but were determined not to get played, two people desperate to prove we would not, under any circumstances, recidivate.
Months passed. The snow had ceded most of its territory to the ever-encroaching asphalt. I was leaving the library when I glanced down the hall and saw the glass panes of his office door glowing with an inner light. I can’t explain why I walked toward the door and took a seat on the bench opposite it, the same bench where two years earlier, I’d told him I wasn’t looking for him.
I had nowhere to be, so I opened the Laclos novel I was holding and began to read: The illusory authority we appear to let women take is one of the snares they avoid with the most difficulty . . .
But I wasn’t able to absorb anything because the knowledge that he could emerge from his office at any time had flooded my mind with narrative potential, and this potential was far more diverting than any actual narrative could be. Suddenly I saw all the possible conclusions to our liaison. The version where I succumbed to compassion and invited him for a conspicuous coffee in the dining hall. The version where he invited me into his office and I closed the door behind me in dutiful fulfillment of the female comedy. The version where our contact dissipated on its own until years later we encountered each other on the Upper East Side and exchanged the faintest of smiles before walking on, etc., etc. But as soon as I imagined a scenario, I lost any interest in enacting it.
At last he opened the door. Surprise came over his face and then a grotesque look of gratification. “Are you waiting for me?”
I studied his face closely before it disappeared. Even now I felt the sting of compassion.
“No,” I said, and resumed reading.
Nina Deval is a writer based in Chicago.