Scandalous

Chapter 13

He found Daniel by the bar, said his goodbyes with the economy of a man who had already mentally left the building, retrieved his car from the valet with a tip that was appropriate and a thank you that was genuine, and pulled out of the semicircle driveway onto Mulholland with the windows down and the night air doing what it could.

It wasn't doing enough.

He drove without music. He took the long way — not deliberately, not with any plan, just the series of turns that presented themselves and that he took because making decisions about the route required a portion of his attention he was not currently willing to divert. The rest of it was occupied.

He had touched her knee.

He turned this fact over in his mind with the deliberate, methodical attention he gave to things he needed to understand clearly, without softening or revision. Not the version of the fact that was most comfortable — not the version in which it had been purely instinctive and therefore neutral, not the version in which it had lasted half a second and been appropriately brief. The actual version. His palm against her bare knee. His fingers curved against her skin. His thumb moving.

He had sat there and moved his thumb against the skin of his student's knee and he had felt — and this was the part that required the most honest attention — he had felt the warmth of it. Not in an abstract sense. In a specific, immediate, physical sense that had nothing academic about it and that he could not, with any intellectual integrity, attribute entirely to the compassion of the gesture.

He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose and then put his hand back on the wheel.

It had been a comforting gesture. He believed this. It had come from the right place — from the part of him that had stood in a hospital corridor at twelve years old and been told something permanent, and that recognized the specific geography of that kind of loss in another person. When she had described the rain and the brakes and waking up three days later to a different life, something in him had moved before his brain had issued any instructions, and the hand had followed. That was true.

Also true: the moment his palm had made contact with her skin, something else had happened. Something that had nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with the fact of her — the warmth of her, the specific softness of her skin, the way the contact had been immediate and real in a way that had briefly reorganized his awareness of everything else in the room.

He was not going to pretend that hadn't happened.

He was a thirty-five year old man and she was seventeen and she was his student and he was not going to soften the facts of those things or arrange them into a shape that was easier to look at than they actually were. The facts were the facts. He was her teacher. That was the entirety of what he was permitted to be, and anything that existed beyond that boundary — any feeling, any awareness, any moment in a library where the distance between them had quietly rearranged itself — was wrong. Not complicated. Wrong.

He shouldn't have touched her.

He tightened his grip on the wheel.

He shouldn't have touched her and he should not have felt what he felt when he touched her and those two things were connected, which was exactly what made the first one worse. If it had been purely instinctive — if the gesture had been as innocent in his body as it had been in his intention — there would be nothing to examine. You put a hand on someone's shoulder, you say without words that you're there, you take the hand back. Clean. He had done that a hundred times with a hundred students in a hundred professional contexts and not once had the word feel been relevant to the transaction.

This had not been like that.

He switched lanes and did not particularly register doing it.

She was beautiful. He could say that with the same clinical precision he would apply to any observable fact — she was beautiful, she had been beautiful since the first day she'd sat in the back left corner of Room 214 and looked at him with those green eyes and he had noticed and he had filed the observation and moved past it because that was what you did. You noticed because you were a human being with eyes and then you moved past it because you were a professional and those were the terms of the arrangement.

He had moved past it. He had been moving past it all week.

What he had not adequately accounted for was what it would be like to sit across from her in a library for an hour and a half and find out that she was also — and this was the word he kept arriving at and kept trying to find an alternative to — extraordinary. Not impressive in the performative way that Crestwood students were frequently impressive. Not clever in the way that clever students were clever. Something rarer than that. The way she had argued about Macbeth — the way she had actually listened to his counterargument and updated her position without either conceding or retreating, the specific intellectual honesty of that — he had sat across from doctoral candidates who couldn't do that. He had sat across from colleagues who couldn't do it.

And she was seventeen and sitting on a velvet sofa in a Beverly Hills library with her legs tucked underneath her and her hair coming loose at the back of her neck and she had said the flaw was load-bearing back at him in his own words and then pushed past them to something he hadn't said, something he hadn't thought to say, something better, and he had felt —

He exhaled through his nose.

He had felt like himself. He had felt like the version of himself that existed before the marriage had settled into what it had settled into, before the years had done what they'd done, before whatever had gone quiet in him had gone quiet. He had felt genuinely, fully present in a way that was so unfamiliar by now that the contrast of it was almost physical — like a room being lit after a long time in the dark, the sudden sharpness of it.

He had no business feeling that way.

He had even less business feeling it because of her.

She was seventeen. She was his student. She sat in the back left corner of his second period class and annotated her books before he assigned the chapters and looked at him with those steady green eyes and said precise, devastating things about Fitzgerald, and the appropriate response to all of that — the only appropriate response — was to be the teacher she deserved. The one who gave her room to think and pushed back when she needed it and left everything else at the door.

He had left none of it at the door tonight.

You shouldn't have gone near that library, he told himself, in the clipped, northern interior voice that had no patience for sentimentality. You should have stayed in the drawing room with Daniel and the Billecart-Salmon and the man complaining about property values in the Palisades. You should have been bored and appropriate and gone home.

He hadn't done any of those things.

He turned onto the freeway and watched the city spread itself out on either side of him, indifferent and enormous, and told himself with some force that what had happened tonight was not going to happen again. Not the conversation that went somewhere it shouldn't. Not the migration to a quieter room. Not the hand on the knee and everything that had accompanied the hand on the knee. He was her teacher. He was going to be her teacher and nothing beyond that. Anything that had developed in him that was not consistent with that position needed to be identified and removed.

He had done harder things than this.

He was fairly certain he had done harder things than this.

The house on Altadena Drive was dark when he pulled in. Every window, no light from the study, no glow from the television — the particular complete darkness of a house where no one is home rather than the partial darkness of one where someone is asleep. On a Saturday night, Nathan had known before he turned the corner that the lights would be off. He had known it the way you know things you've stopped being surprised by — not with bitterness exactly, just with the flat, factual recognition of a pattern.

He parked. Sat in the car for a moment. Went inside.

The house was quiet and held the faint particular smell of emptiness — not unpleasant, just the smell of rooms that have been closed up for hours with no one moving through them. He didn't turn on the overhead lights. He went to the kitchen, drank a glass of water standing at the counter, and looked at the dark backyard through the window above the sink. Just the shapes of the unfamiliar California plants against the fence, and the night above them, and the ambient light of the city doing its permanent, ambient thing.

He rinsed the glass. Set it on the drying rack.

He went upstairs. Changed in the dark — not bothering with the lamp, just the practiced mechanics of a man who has gotten undressed in enough dark rooms to do it without assistance. He hung his jacket. Set his watch on the nightstand. Sat on the edge of the bed for a moment with his forearms on his knees and his hands loosely together and looked at the floor.

Then he lay down.

The ceiling was the same ceiling it had been every night since they'd arrived — smooth plaster, pale in the dark, offering nothing. He looked at it with the focused, purposeless attention of a man whose mind is running too loud for sleep and has accepted, provisionally, that sleep is not the immediate priority.

The house settled around him. A car passed on the street outside. The refrigerator made a sound from two floors below that he had not yet learned to stop hearing.

He thought about Maryanne, briefly — about where she was on a Saturday night when she wasn't home, about the specific texture of not particularly wanting to know. He thought about the unreliable narration paper still sitting unopened on his laptop. He thought about Daniel's face when he'd said you seem alright after Nathan had reappeared from wherever he'd been for the last ninety minutes, and Nathan had said fine, just tired and Daniel had accepted this with the courtesy of a man who knew when not to ask.

He thought about a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves and a velvet sofa and two people in it who had not been where they were supposed to be.

He thought about green eyes, steady and level across a discussion about Macbeth, and the way a mind sounded when it was fully engaged and not performing anything.

He thought about his thumb moving across warm skin.

He closed his eyes.

She's your student, he said to himself, in the quiet of the dark room. Firmly. Without room for negotiation.

The ceiling had no response.

He lay there. The night passed in the incremental way it passes when you are awake and waiting for it to do something, which it never does — it simply continues, indifferent and unhurried, doing what nights do. He could hear his own breathing. He could hear, distantly, the ambient hum of Pasadena going about its Saturday night, unconcerned with the particular problem he was failing to resolve.

At some point the front door opened downstairs. Keys on the hallway table. Heels on the kitchen floor, one and then the other — the specific two-step of someone removing shoes after a long night out. The refrigerator opened and closed. Then the stairs, and the bathroom, and the particular sounds of Maryanne navigating the end of an evening with the self-contained efficiency she applied to everything. She came into the bedroom. He kept his eyes closed and his breathing even. She moved around the dark room, set something on her nightstand, got into bed with the practiced minimum of disturbance.

Within a few minutes she was asleep.

He was not.

He looked at the ceiling in the dark and he thought, despite every reasonable instruction he had given himself on the drive home and at the kitchen sink and on the edge of this bed, about a girl who had read Giovanni's Room independently and could argue Macbeth and smelled like something warm and faint that he had no business cataloguing and had looked at him, when he took his hand away, with those green unreadable eyes and said see you Monday, Mr. Kingston with the corner of her mouth doing the thing it did.

He was going to be her teacher on Monday.

He was going to be professional and appropriate and nothing more, and it was not going to be complicated, and he was going to stop thinking about it now.

He thought about it for another forty-five minutes before he slept.