When the conversation with Ruth finally came, Prima was not shocked. She’d had a consciousness, since that first day in Hamilton Hall, of becoming increasingly entangled in the universe, of her name no longer being the name of an innocent, of deliberation and responsibility, of laying down tracks that would determine the direction of decades in her life. This she relished. There was a feeling among her classmates of wanting to remain clean—not sexually clean or physically clean but clean of commitments. The other students wanted to be well rounded; they wanted the freedom to choose, later on, from a variety of paths for which they had prepared; they wanted to have relationships that would ready them for an eventual mate but would not yet tie them permanently to anyone. They wanted more than anything to maintain their neutral goodness. They did not want to appear in articles online or in newspapers, unless they were cast in a glowing light. They loved stories of grotesque misbehavior and ruination; they loved these stories because they felt safe and lucky, and it excited them to live happily in the same world in which other people suffered, people who, they felt, had been given all the same tools as they had but had shown themselves to be rapists, or racists, or cheats, or fools. Prima did not fear the vicissitudes of adulthood. Even as a child she had wished gravely to be an adult. She hated being protected; she hated the ugly signs around the campus that instructed her on how to wash her hands, where to store her coat. She knew that adulthood was punishing and ecstatic, that one could not remain clean, that over the years one would go in and out of favor with other people. One’s only real responsibility was to remain self-sufficient and stoic, and she felt that, because she understood this, she was prepared for anything.
She was not romantically interested in other undergraduates. Innocence did not attract her. Not that all the other students were innocent, but even if they were eccentric, even if they were ambitious, they had a quality of being untested: they simply seemed young. Sometimes, in her first year, she had met graduate students at the bar on Amsterdam and gone home with them. Even they had not really seemed like adults to her. They’d betrayed their moral anxiety when they commented on her youth. At the time she had always admitted that she was eighteen. This had not stopped the graduate students, and she could tell that it excited them, yet they disliked themselves for the way in which it excited them. They drank heavily in order to disguise their excitement from themselves, and they told her that she seemed very mature, she didn’t seem eighteen. She began to worry that adulthood was not what she had imagined, that it was as fearful and strict as adolescence, and that, in order to distract themselves from the fact that their lives remained adolescent, adults resorted to alcohol. She drank very little. She loved a clear head. Her loneliness—and this was what pained her most, this was the element of her loneliness that haunted her—struck her as a particularly adolescent loneliness, because it was the loneliness of feeling that she did not understand people and they did not understand her, and that despite her talent for paying attention she did not have a facility for social happiness.
She decided to study philosophy. In the fall semester of her sophomore year she enrolled in a course that was cross-listed in the English and sociology departments, because it seemed to her to be devoted to studying life: a course on marriage, which was taught by Eugenia Heiss. “Marriage” was a word, like “motherhood,” like “betrayal,” that seemed to Prima to belong thoroughly to adulthood and to contain inexhaustible intellectual riches. It was one of the great excitements of adulthood to realize that marriage was not always just a response to expectation and convention, as it had been for her parents; marriage could be a complex, intimate architecture, an institution through which all the responsibility and power of adulthood might be expressed.
At the first, introductory lecture, in a classroom high up in Hamilton Hall and saturated in that late-August week with a languid heat, Prima had listened as Heiss spoke about the deceptive quality of the monolith of marriage, the fact that, though we feel it is simply part of the landscape, it is in truth alive and acting on us at all times. The ideological and ethical and logistical forces it exerts, even on those who are unmarried, cause us to construct ourselves and our choices in relation to how we understand it. Prima had the impression that Heiss took nothing for granted. Even the fact that she could not tell whether Heiss was a man or a woman, though she knew that Heiss’s first name was listed on the syllabus as Eugenia, helped impress on her the sense that in that lecture room life was like a ball of Play-Doh that could be stretched and smashed into new shapes as one saw fit. Heiss had cheekbones that were elegant and a nose that, although in a different context it might also have looked elegant, was knifelike, almost frightening. Prima pictured Heiss getting into bed and laying that nose down carefully, gently, so that it would not slice through the pillow. Heiss’s bed would be a platform floating in a room, with no clutter around it; the only other objects would be a curved lamp and a cabinet to hold Heiss’s linen shirts and trousers. Heiss spoke without notes, and yet clearly according to some preconceived plan. When Heiss’s eyes landed on Prima where she sat in the front row, she knew, even with no gesture or evident sign, that Heiss was impressed by her beauty, and further that Heiss was not disturbed by being impressed. She felt Heiss’s thumb pressing heavily on the ball of Play-Doh that life had become. She did not speak to Heiss after class, nor did she go to Heiss’s office hours until the entire month of September had elapsed. She cleaned her face carefully each morning and, when she wore her hair back, adorned it with some ribbon or charm. She allowed herself to gather, through Heiss’s lectures, a sense of the shape of Heiss’s thumb, and occasionally, with a torrential sensation of inevitability, she walked out of the classroom and across the lawn to Butler Library, where there was a single-stall bathroom in which she could lock the door and touch herself until her legs trembled.
Ruth was a person whom Prima did not understand, and whom she mistrusted. Ruth was no longer an undergraduate, though she had been enrolled at one point; nor was she a graduate student or a faculty member. She had a part-time administrative role in the English department, as a research assistant for an untenured professor named Thalia Campbell. Thalia paid her for twenty hours per week, but Ruth had taken over the better part of the desk in Thalia’s cramped office, and it was Ruth who was visible there every day, while Thalia taught, held meetings in the classroom that was frequently assigned to her, and attended to her three children. Ruth was present in the English-department hallway more often than Daphne, the department’s full-time secretary. There was a quality about Ruth of emotional homelessness. She brought her lunch in an aluminum box and wore slippers in the hall. Thalia was known for her feminist leanings and her syllabi that prioritized women writers; when young women who were not enrolled in Thalia’s classes passed through the department, Ruth sometimes asked them whether they had read “Nightwood” or “Fear of Flying,” and suggested that, if they hadn’t yet, they might try Thalia’s class. Once, Ruth was watching from across the hall when Prima knocked on Heiss’s door during office hours and Heiss, on emerging, said, teasingly, Are you keeping a log on me, Ruthie?
Prima felt that there was something humiliating in Ruth’s loyalty to Thalia, and in her unsmiling scrutiny of Heiss. Prima began to avoid Ruth; and, after the end of the fall semester, by which time her relationship with Heiss transpired solely off campus, or occasionally in the empty lecture room on the fifth floor of Hamilton Hall, she no longer had any reason to visit the English department. But, near the start of this most recent semester, a new autumn, a season that now smelled flamboyantly to Prima of the eraser chalk in Hamilton and her own pussy on her fingertips, Prima had written a love letter to Heiss and gone up to the faculty boxes in the English department to deliver it. She had never left anything but her assignments for Fictions of Marriage in Heiss’s box; she knew that to leave a love letter there was subtly dangerous, that it might fall open in front of Daphne, or that some other student leaving a paper for Heiss might be overcome with curiosity and open it. To this end, she sealed the letter with a wax stamp, which would require a steamer to undo cleanly. Stationery gave her great pleasure. There was something erotic for her in the melting of the wax, the weight of the seal. It was like a very hard, demanding kiss; it overflowed its bounds. It was excessive and archaic.
The evening before, Sunday, she had lain on her belly on Heiss’s bed, her legs spread wide, feeling herself boundless, her interior expanding to engulf the room, Heiss’s hand titanic inside her. In the letter, she had confided to Heiss, for the first time, about the pages she had kept in the back of her red notebook, in which she had described, after two particularly thrilling lectures, what she loved about Heiss’s voice and hands. She had never shared this before. Early on she had wanted to witness and receive the language of Heiss’s desire without interruption, without collaboration, to learn it as if from start to finish. Yet she felt, that morning in October, that they had passed into a new landscape; she felt herself holding shapes that emerged independently from within her and which she could see delighted Heiss. She wanted to mark the change between the girl who, hiding her arousal, had left essays in Heiss’s faculty box a year earlier, and the girl whose body now spoke to Heiss so constantly and brutally of its thirst. Holding the note with its wax seal, she had moved up the steps toward the department office so quickly that her earrings had seemed to tinkle and laugh in her ears.
In the hallway was Ruth. Ruth knew who she was. Ruth remembered her name.
Was it possible that Ruth knew about her and Heiss? Was it possible that anyone knew? As Prima stood in the hallway speaking to Ruth, her mind moved over the contours of the previous year and reviewed the evidence. Ruth doesn’t know anything, she told herself. Ruth is merely acting as Thalia’s puppet, gossiping and fearmongering. For Ruth wasn’t saying anything to Prima that implied that Prima loved Heiss. Instead, she had accosted Prima and was asking her whether she knew about Heiss’s indiscretions, about Heiss’s overly warm interest in the students, about what had happened years ago between Heiss and Anne Lucas. During this initial barrage, Prima was overwhelmed with the suspicion that Ruth was saying this to her because Ruth thought that Prima was like this girl named Anne Lucas. Ruth thought that Prima needed some kind of rescue. Unable to help herself, Prima said, sternly, Why are you telling me this? A defensive look came over Ruth’s face, then a tender one, a look of condescension that infuriated Prima. Ruth explained that she thought it was important for Heiss’s students to know. It was a travesty, actually, that Heiss was still allowed to teach and that Heiss’s courses were so popular. Ruth hoped, she added, as if to absolve them both of any implication that Prima loved Heiss, that Prima would inform other students of Heiss’s proclivities. It would be better if they knew so that they wouldn’t be caught off guard, as Anne Lucas had been. Well, I don’t really see why you’re discussing this with me, Prima said. It seems as though it’s a private thing to do with Anne Lucas. She wanted to shame Ruth. It worked for a moment: Ruth stepped back slightly.
Then Ruth said, You know, I have Anne’s e-mail, and I bet she’d be happy to talk to you. Prima stared at Ruth. She felt repelled by Ruth, in her slippers, her hair greasy in its clip. Ruth had no purpose except to meddle. Ruth had no work of her own. Ruth cherished her little belief that other people had thrown away their goodness but that she remained good. Then Prima was overcome by a sudden curiosity that was almost like desire; she had the sensation of being on the verge of discovering a secret, and the same intelligence inside her that ached to understand the terrain of adulthood—marriage, motherhood, betrayal—lunged toward it. O.K., Prima said, you can give me Anne’s e-mail. She could see by the way that Ruth went to her computer and noted down the e-mail on a scrap of paper that this was not really permitted. Ruth had offered this as a bargaining chip that she had not expected Prima to accept. Her attitude reminded Prima of the men at the bar on Amsterdam, who dealt in boasts dressed as revelations, and were almost dazed when a girl took them seriously. As Ruth approached her with the scrap of paper, she said, You remind me of Anne. She used to wear her hair in a braid, too.
Prima discovered when she sat down at a long table in the library that she had in her pocket not only the scrap with Anne Lucas’s e-mail written on it but the sealed letter to Heiss, which she had not delivered. In a way that did not make sense to her, the sealed letter, which had previously had an erotic, conspiratorial weight to it, now had a shameful air. Prima felt that it was something she had made alone and that belonged only to her. It was like a diary. This she could not contemplate for too long; she was preoccupied with the scrap of paper. The feeling of perhaps uncovering a great secret, which Ruth’s face had given her for a moment in the hallway outside Thalia’s office, had deserted her. Now the decision of whether or not to contact Anne was merely a type of responsibility, an intrusion. As she disliked the idea of Thalia Campbell, whom she had never met, she disliked the idea of Anne Lucas. She conceived of them both as censors who tracked across the landscape of the university, like Scantron machines searching for shapes that had been filled in with pen. She realized that during the previous year she had had a sensation, on the campus where she lived, of evading the eyes of these Scantron machines, which moved slowly and in deliberate patterns. If she stayed in any one place for too long, they would happen across her figure darkening a room where she did not belong.
Heiss’s classroom was the room she circled. It had belonged to other people in other decades, in other years, but this year that classroom was Prima’s; her life was the life that unfolded inside it. Irrationally, she felt it was an offense that she was so often barred from it, and that to make love in that room, an act that was a perfect cognate of the experience she’d had of being taught by Heiss in that room, was dangerous and unprincipled, though on two memorable occasions she and Heiss had done so. At this thought, she slapped the table—it was inconceivable that she was still considered a child at twenty years old, and she had an explosive feeling that she would never be a free adult, that there was no such thing as free adulthood. All her life, people would limit what was allowed her, as they did with Heiss. She would be forced to learn to enjoy the feeling of harmless transgression, as Heiss did. This was perhaps the part of Heiss, Prima thought, to which Heiss remained deliberately blind. Heiss had admitted to Prima, with relish, what a pleasure it was to be to her both a lecturer and a lover. This made sense to Prima, since it was Heiss’s being a lecturer as well as a lover that appealed so much to her, too. She did not know what she would have felt about Heiss if they had encountered each other at a deli or on the subway; it was with the composition and the delivery of Heiss’s intelligence that Prima had fallen in love. But Heiss was not aware, or did not want to be aware, of the pleasure of loving Prima while avoiding the eyes of the censors. Heiss felt toward the relationship between them a kind of atavistic idealism, which connected the experience to relationships between the Greek erastes and eromenos. Heiss’s course on marriage drew on a personal disgust for the marriage-equality movement and contemporary lesbian and gay politics, which was well disguised and admitted privately to Prima; and Heiss prized the concept of a relationship that had its own, original homosocial tradition. Through these ideals Heiss conveyed both an impression that contemporary sexual mores were prudish and a desire that the relationship between them could be public. Prima had a feeling that Heiss was dedicated to these ideals precisely because they had fallen out of favor. This did not disturb Prima—she respected it, it was this inclination toward trouble that allowed Heiss to speak in such revelatory ways about institutions and concepts that no one else in Prima’s life had ever questioned. But she wished that Heiss would own this pleasure in transgression itself. It was to this end that she had composed the love letter with the intention of leaving it in Heiss’s box. She had known that finding it in the box would arouse Heiss, and she had wished to assert for Heiss her perception and her sexual intelligence. She had pictured Heiss unsealing the letter, reading it, and realizing, Prima can discern what I truly want. Prima knows what controls me even better than I know it myself.
In the course of that day the name Anne Lucas took on a distinctly talismanic quality. Prima did not reread the scrap of paper; nor did she speak to anyone about Anne Lucas. She had a constant atmospheric awareness of what the name represented, as if it were a piece of news that other people were thinking about. She went to the place where she most liked to be alone—the top step of St. John the Divine. The cathedral was a two-block walk down from the southern edge of campus. Red double-decker tourist buses driving up Amsterdam regularly stopped in front of it. There always seemed to be rain at the cathedral, though Prima knew this must be because it was only on rainy days that she felt the need to visit.
She pitied Anne Lucas. Anne Lucas was no longer really a person. She had ceded her name so that it could represent how she felt about something she had experienced, which belonged to other people now, in a reduced, hostile form. Prima thought about the possibility that there was a person in the world—perhaps Ruth was this person or would someday be this person—for whom Prima’s name was this kind of talisman. But it was really Heiss she felt afraid for, because for Heiss the university was like a family estate. For decades Heiss had trained to understand the laws and values of the university. Prima pictured the elderly, tenured Heiss like an old king who wishes to be buried on the land he spent his life protecting. It was rare that a person travelled far from home and found a place that belonged to them utterly. Her attraction to Heiss was in part an attraction to this solidity, the grace that radiated from a person who wished to be nowhere else. She thought of Heiss, and she thought, I love Heiss. Love is disinterested, the thing that I feel for Heiss is love.
Near where Prima was sitting, on the top step of the cathedral, was a girl who looked familiar to her. The girl was wearing a green-and-red checked coat that was too warm for early October, and which Prima remembered seeing frequently during the winter she’d spent in her first-year dorm. It was ugly in a way that had made Prima scrunch up her face involuntarily. It wasn’t expensive to live among beautiful things—they were available everywhere for almost nothing—and Prima felt it was a kind of personal affront to be faced with ugly things that were not just part of the built landscape but had been consciously or carelessly chosen. The girl had a face that was delicate, pinkish and gaunt in some lights. Prima thought she would be suited to a long coat that was navy or dark brown, in very soft wool. Hey, Prima said to the girl, do I know you from Wallach? The girl was lighting what looked like a joint or a spliff. She was trying to make a cave with her body against the edifice of the cathedral for the sake of the lighter. She looked up at Prima. Yeah, she said, I’m Fernanda. You’re Prima. Prima liked Fernanda’s name, she felt there was some synergy between the delicacy of Fernanda’s face and the name Fernanda. Want some? Fernanda asked Prima when she had lit the spliff. There was a synergy, too, between the spliff and the shelter of the cathedral steps. Sure, Prima said. She took a hit. She loved the spread of the nicotine; her spine felt straighter.
She and Fernanda talked about the things they had in common, what buildings they lived in now, what classes they were taking. Fernanda had skipped her seminar that day. She was anxious, she told Prima, because the man she had been dating had been growing colder toward her. It was an exaggeration to say that they were dating; they had spent two heady, chaotic weeks together, during which time they had barely come up for air. Fernanda had dragged herself from his bed to go to class, but only to class. They’d ordered in from a restaurant around the corner from his apartment on 101st Street, and Fernanda had written her assignments with her laptop perched on a pillow while he lay curled up like a pet between her knees. The man was playful and uninhibited. She liked his unself-consciousness, the way he didn’t hesitate to share his toothbrush with her, the way his gestures were catlike, almost feminine. He was a writer; he didn’t have to go to work, and it didn’t seem to Fernanda that he did much writing, either. Finally, on Friday afternoon, three days previously, he had informed Fernanda that he had an assignment due Monday morning, that she had better go home for the weekend since he would have to get down to work in a serious way. He would message her when he had filed with his editor. But it was past four on Monday, and she had not heard from him.
Fernanda did not want to be comforted or told platitudes about the situation she was in, she said. She knew clearly what it meant; she was not in the habit of wishful thinking or desperation. Prima was relieved to hear this. Her own frankness had sometimes made it difficult for her to form friendships. She agreed with Fernanda that she was in a hopeless situation, which she likely had no choice but to accept, and she admired Fernanda’s determination to get on with it. Fernanda said that the thing she could not stop thinking about was whether her willingness to spend two weeks sleeping in this man’s apartment had given him the impression that she was needy, or simple, or that rather than a discerning woman she was a hole that begged to be filled. She had given him the benefit of the doubt during those two weeks. She had assumed that he was genuinely smitten with her, and that his lack of dedication to his work was the result of a temporary setback or a much needed break; she had not interpreted his availability as the product of some set of neuroses that might make him ineligible to become her boyfriend. Why did she have the sense that he had judged her for the speed with which she’d abandoned her little circumscribed set of rooms at the university? Had she not chosen a university in the city in part for this purpose—to be allowed adventures? Fernanda shook her head in disgust.
Anyway, she said to Prima, you don’t look like you’re suffering romantically. Honestly, you look like you’re in love. Prima laughed; this was an idea that thrilled her. In the year that she had loved Heiss, no one other than Heiss had pointed out that she was evidently in love. She had not told anyone anything about her romance, except for a brief confession during a weekend trip she had taken over the summer, to her aunt’s house on Cape Cod. On that trip, she had been approached on the beach, while her cousin was swimming, by a boy about her age, gangly and suntanned, who asked to sit in her cousin’s lounger. He wanted to know whether she was staying in town and whether he could take her out in the evening. Oh, she said, I shouldn’t, I have a boyfriend. The boy had taken this on very mildly. He asked where she was from and what she was studying and how she had met her boyfriend. His friendliness was unusual and refreshing. She told him that her boyfriend had been her professor, and that it wasn’t until after the class had finished that they had fallen in love. She had never called Heiss her boyfriend before, and she wondered whether Heiss would be amused by the term. In that moment she had wanted to kiss the gangly boy. He would blush, he would remember the kiss as a shocking event, a gift from the girl with the long braid and the embroidered bikini, the girl who said that she had a professor for a boyfriend. The boy said that it sounded like something out of a book. Yeah, Prima had said, I think so, too.
With Fernanda, on the steps of the cathedral, Prima was again overcome by the wish to admit her love for Heiss. It was against her rules; the fact that Fernanda was clear-eyed about her own disappointment did not mean that she would be clear-eyed about Prima’s love. Yet all her instincts had converged in the previous few hours to assert and defend her resolve in her love. She remembered with satisfaction the sudden hostility with which she’d spoken to Ruth.
You’re right, she said to Fernanda, I’m in love. Fernanda smiled and dragged on the spliff. She wasn’t jealous; she enjoyed existing in a world where at any point a girl could find herself in love. Want to tell me about him? Fernanda said. Oh, it’s not a man, Prima said. She wasn’t sure what else to say. Heiss was just as surely not a woman, and she had no sense of whether the way Heiss moved in private—the way Heiss spoke, the way Heiss’s body was formed, the way Heiss fucked—she had no sense of whether or not women, lesbian women, were like Heiss or did the same things.
Oh, sorry, Fernanda said. I shouldn’t assume. Do you want to tell me about whoever it is? It’s someone I took a class with last year, Prima said. My professor. She gave Fernanda a confiding look. She was illuminated by the nascent trust she felt toward Fernanda. Fernanda’s gauzy face turned squarely toward Prima. Its gauziness seemed to recede, and it became concrete and modern. She said, Is it that English professor, Heiss? Prima nodded. Of course it was Heiss. She had seen the other professors. She shouldn’t be surprised that Fernanda had guessed that it was Heiss. Her cheeks felt raw. Fernanda said, You were sweet and straight with me about this guy I’ve been seeing, so I think I should be straight with you, too. My sister went to school here, and she was good friends with Nicole Mangoula. Nicole and Heiss had a thing. Do you know about this—have you heard about Nicole? It ended badly. For Nicole, I mean. She hates Heiss. She feels like Heiss really manipulated her. She doesn’t feel like it was a normal relationship. In my sister’s year, Heiss ended up having this weird reputation. That class was popular. I think my sister was jealous of Nicole, honestly. Heiss took her on vacation! Fernanda sucked on the little nub of the spliff and then ground it into the cathedral step with her boot. Listen, I’m not trying to judge you, Fernanda said. I bet it’s a whole hot thing. It’s just . . . I’d want to know, if I was really in it with someone.
Prima nodded again. She said something that seemed to come from nowhere. She had no idea where it had come from; it was at odds with her love for Heiss. She said, Do you think I’m being stupid? No thought was so devastating to Prima as the thought that she was being stupid, not accidentally, not briefly, that she was ascribing wisdom and seriousness to something that would turn out to be stupid. No, Fernanda said. Why would it be stupid? I’d never turn down a little experience. Obviously, she said, with a stifled laugh. Since I just told you how I spent the last two weeks.
Was she being stupid? Prima asked herself again, once she was back at her apartment. Did she imagine she knew better than other people, when in fact they were simply watching and waiting for her to fail, knowing that she was not intelligent but simply arrogant? She did think she knew better than other people. Not always, not in every case. But with regard to herself she seldom hesitated. She did not look at what other people did and think, That’s the way it must be done. She did not look at what other people did and think, Since that was a mistake for you, it might be a mistake for me. Perhaps the loneliness she had felt before she met Heiss had been a result of her not considering other people as fellow-travellers or as people who might teach her something. This was the first time in her life that she had wondered if she had truly misunderstood her situation. Ruth’s views did not hold any weight, but the fact that Fernanda’s well of knowledge and ideas about Heiss was so potent that at the mere mention of Prima’s love affair Fernanda had supplied the name herself . . . Prima flinched. She did not conceive of her relationship with Heiss as original. She knew that it was not the first relationship between a young woman and her professor, not even the first such relationship in Heiss’s life. Why should originality interest her? The table Heiss had invited her to had not been set with her in mind, but nor had the university been built for her, or the furniture in her first-year dorm selected for her, the books she cherished written for her.
She conducted an experiment in her mind. A year ago, she had found that it was Heiss who excited her, Heiss’s voice, Heiss’s energy, Heiss’s graceful intelligence. What should have happened then? Should Heiss, when Prima finally presented herself at office hours in the first week of October, have pretended not to find her beautiful? Should Heiss merely have complimented her work and shut the door on her? That afternoon Prima had done something very deliberate, which now, in retrospect, made her blush. During the conversation she had had with Heiss in Heiss’s office, in which she had presented two competing ideas for her midterm paper and invited Heiss to comment on them, she had pulled her braid forward over her shoulder and begun to unravel it, very slowly, as Heiss spoke. She unravelled it with the finesse and care with which she usually braided it. While she listened to Heiss she used both hands to separate the three strands, and after each step she ran two fingers through the length of hair that had now been released. Heiss’s expression did not change. Heiss watched her unravel her braid while giving thoughtful commentary on Prima’s ideas, and even suggested a book that might help her organize her argument. But at the moment that Prima completed the unravelling of the braid and stroked her fingers through to the ends of her hair, Heiss stopped speaking. Heiss was arrested. It was the most erotic moment of Prima’s life.
She conducted the experiment seriously. She tried to think about it as another person might think about it—not Fernanda, not Ruth, but some principled, severe woman, not unlike how she imagined Thalia Campbell. Perhaps Thalia Campbell believed that Heiss should have watched her unravel her braid and thought, That was a lovely moment, which will stand alone. Perhaps Thalia Campbell believed that, when Prima and Heiss walked together down the stairs in Hamilton Hall one afternoon, Heiss should not have asked Prima whether she would like to come to the pastry shop on Amsterdam. Heiss should not have bought her a slice of pie. Heiss should never have entertained an attraction to her, because in relation to Heiss she was a person who was powerless. Heiss understood things about the world, and about love, that Prima did not yet understand; by wishing to love Prima, in her youth and ignorance, Heiss revealed a desire for subtle dominance, an advantage and control that Prima would not be cognizant of as Thalia Campbell might be. Perhaps Thalia Campbell believed that someday Prima’s realization that she had been dominated and controlled in ways she did not yet understand would pain her. She would feel that she had been tricked; her conception of love would be poisoned. This was what she was being warned against by the invocation of Anne’s and Nicole’s names. These invocations were a piece of knowledge, like a book, with which other women wished her to be in serious conversation. Prima wondered, with pure bafflement, if there would come a time when people did not worry about her innocence and wish to protect her. When would her sense that she was wise be corroborated by her environment? Would people, when she was twenty-five, when she was thirty, when she was forty—would people still harbor fear on her behalf?
She asked for the first time, aloud, standing by the door to her apartment, a spot from which she had not moved in an hour, Why did Anne and Nicole wish they’d been protected? What had happened to them with Heiss? She shook her head. They were not her. She was not in a system; she was in a relationship. She had read enough to know that one day, in some way or another, she would feel that she had been tricked, even if not at Heiss’s hands. This would happen to her! She hoped it would happen to her—she hoped that hers would not be a sheltered life. In this surge of feeling, Prima became aware of how alone she was. She was alone in her studio apartment in Harlem. She could not believe that only the previous night she had been in Heiss’s apartment, in Heiss’s bed, and that she had felt completely fused with Heiss. In a way that she did not understand, and that had nothing to do with Ruth’s implications, she now felt strangely abandoned by Heiss. Why was it that Heiss was not going through this with her? Why had Heiss not been frank with her about how hurt Anne and Nicole had been? Why had Heiss not confided to her the pain of being accused of these abuses, and said to her, You and I know that we are in love, you and I know that you are a woman in your own right?
Perhaps Heiss had been afraid that, if Prima knew that Anne and Nicole felt mistreated, she herself would become distrustful. If so, Heiss had underestimated her in a manner that caused her more pain than any of the conversations she had had on this bleak day. She sat in the high-backed chair in her kitchenette. She unlaced her shoes and pulled them off. If Heiss had not confided in her, it had to be because Heiss considered her too young or too fragile to comprehend this wretched history in its context. Did Heiss think that she was just like Anne and Nicole? Did Heiss—loving her, touching her, enjoying her—throughout all this imagine that someday she, too, would rebuke Heiss for the distortion of her sense of love, and the theft of her innocence?
The next morning Prima went back to the English department, back to Heiss’s box. She left a new note, not a love letter but a folded piece of card stock on which she attempted to address Heiss as a teacher, rather than as a lover. She encountered no one in the office.
In the evening Heiss came to Prima’s apartment, even though her note had explicitly forbidden it. Heiss knocked heavily on the door, behind which was all of Prima’s existence: Prima’s clothes and the special teas she had collected, Prima’s chair and her box of card stock, and the sealed letter that she had not delivered because she had been accosted by Ruth. It was this impotent letter that disturbed her the most and around which she felt herself curled like a hibernating animal. She had been, in the moment before she was accosted, suffused with the most personal and significant feelings of her life. The letter signified the radicalism of her love. She had not merely given herself to Heiss but understood and embraced Heiss. She had been scrubbed of her awareness of the past—as love must scrub us of our awareness of the past in order to resurrect itself. Now, against her will, the past had torn through her and over her. Her love letter had been a foible, a stupidity. She was stupid to write down things that she would someday disbelieve and disown.
Heiss had a key to Prima’s apartment, but Prima did not take things that far. Prima opened the door. What is this, Heiss said, a Christmas card? With the parchment, and the ribbons? You can’t write an ugly note to me, Heiss said, even though you want to, because you don’t believe any of it. You know that everything between us is beautiful. That’s just what I had, Prima said. Heiss shrugged out of a waxed coat and hung it over Prima’s chair in the kitchenette. Heiss sat in the chair. What is it that you want to know? Heiss said. What is it that you’re afraid of? Prima loved Heiss’s strong head and the assertive spread of Heiss’s legs in the chair. She wanted to kneel down in front of Heiss. She was clouded by visions of herself in two years, in ten years, looking back with distaste, thinking, You stupid girl, how could you have knelt down in front of Heiss?
Prima said, I don’t understand why they hate you now. Am I going to hate you? Is that part of the plan? Heiss laughed with a painful expression. Heiss said that nothing would be so devastating as to have earned Prima’s hatred. Heiss did not plan on that. Heiss had never planned to provoke any woman’s hatred, but that was a part of life, sometimes people you had loved hated you afterward. If you didn’t plan on it with them, if you didn’t believe they would hate you, Prima said, what makes you so sure that it will be different with me? Heiss looked very tired. Prima did not often think that Heiss looked old, but she did now. She understood that in five years Heiss would be fifty, and the enormity of those decades seemed to press onto her; it was as if Prima understood that each of the years that separated them had been as full of profound life for Heiss as the previous year had been for her, and she felt as though she would collapse under the weight of the life that existed in Heiss. Please, Heiss said, don’t make me condescend to you. I don’t want to condescend to you. I want to be truthful with you. I don’t know if it will be different with you. It feels different to me. You’re different than anyone else. I’m different than I used to be. But it’s possible that I’m blind. I’m a romantic person. I can’t help the way I’m drawn to you, I can’t justify denying it because I’m afraid of something that I don’t know will happen and that I don’t want to happen. I was younger when I knew Anne and Nicole, and I treated love differently. I wanted to indulge it and grow out of it. I wanted to enjoy it for what it was. Anne, she didn’t think of love that way, she didn’t understand that it would end, or that the fact that it ended didn’t diminish it or mean that I hadn’t cared about her.
Prima leaned against the counter. Are you hoping, she said, that I understand that love ends, and that when you end it with me I’ll still believe that you loved me? I’m not hoping that, Heiss said. But I believe you know that. It was true, what Heiss said. Prima knew that fundamentally. She did not conceive of loving what she loved now or living as she did now forever. That would be like marrying a person you had known since elementary school, never venturing beyond. Somehow this belief did not interrupt the flood of her love for Heiss. She tried to clear her head, and she said, Does it matter that you misused your power as a teacher? Not with me but with them? Does it matter to you that you were held up as someone to trust, and that you betrayed their trust? That’s what they feel. And, in a way, it’s true. As Prima said this, she realized that she believed it. She did not wish for Heiss to deny it, to reassure her that no such betrayal had ever happened, that it had all been part of the normal set of misunderstandings that characterized love. She was afraid to discover that Heiss’s authority was not conscious, that Heiss was stubborn and blind.
Heiss stood up beside her. It’s a shame, Heiss said, for you to talk to me about teaching, about power and trust and betrayal, as if you believe that you and Anne and Nicole are children in my care, and as if I’m like a father who convinces you that the dirty things I like to do are for your own good when you’re too small to know better. I did not take you from your crib, and certainly not from your dorm. It’s a travesty that you insist on thinking of yourself as a child, when you have a woman’s mind, a woman’s freedom, a woman’s body. I didn’t know that you thought of yourself that way. Forgive me, Heiss said, spitefully, with a down-curled mouth. Heiss took the waxed coat from the chair and pulled it on. From a pocket of the coat Heiss removed Prima’s note and her ribbon and tossed them onto the counter.
The quiet that followed Heiss’s departure had an almost beseeching quality, like a cat rubbing against Prima’s calves. She rethreaded the ribbon through the note, and from the tea drawer she removed the other letter, still sealed, and placed them side by side. Then she added Ruth’s scrap of paper. She had a feverish, preternatural sense of the world revealing itself to her, as it had once before, in a stifling room high up in Hamilton Hall, back when she still knew everything. ♦
