‘Why not?’
‘Old story: man lets his guard drop, offends the authorities and is sent away. You don’t want to know.’
‘I do.’
He went off at a tangent and talked about Joyce, Mandelstam, Ovid and how exile could benefit a writer (‘you have to leave home in order to know it’), whatever the personal cost. It was typical Rob – evasive literary table talk. He could see I was bored.
‘Fuck it, I might as well tell you,’ he said. ‘Every fucker in Tennessee knows. It’s hardly a secret.’
‘My Corinne’, he called her: whether that was her real name or one he invented, I never found out.
He’d been teaching in Tennessee for two years, ‘long enough to know the ropes’, when she appeared in his class, instantly conspicuous because she looked, and was, ten years older than all the other students, more or less Rob’s age in fact. She’d married young, had a child, divorced, worked in a bar and saved enough money to go back to school. The child, a girl, was still only seven, which made it tough to get to every class. My girl’s been sick, she told Rob, appearing in his office one morning to plead for an extension to an essay deadline. He was used to such pleas, but not to them coming from parents, let alone a parent as striking as Corinne – striking in appearance (diminutive stature, big head of red hair) and striking in her will to succeed. There were strict departmental rules about deadlines, but Rob marked all his own essays, so no one but the two of them would know. Sure, he said, assuming that would satisfy her and she’d go. Instead, she took it as a cue to sit down and started to discuss the essay she had in mind, asking if he thought her ideas would stand up, supposing she could express them in writing – writing was something she found hard, she said, essay-writing anyway, which she hadn’t done since school and a lack of practice at which put her at a disadvantage to all the other students. It would be absurd to say that he fell in love with her there and then, as she sat three feet away on the other side of his desk, small, vulnerable, wringing her hands. Absurd but probably true. Why else would he have kept her there, reassuring her that her ideas weren’t stupid, suggesting a structure that would help them emerge, passing on tips for further reading, even plucking a critical book from his shelf and letting her borrow it (something he never did with undergraduates after one of them dropped out and failed to return his Collected Tennyson)? Why else would he have noticed the silvery scar of a recent pan-burn on her left wrist? Why else would he have closed the window, despite the heat, so that her perfume hung around long after she’d left the room? Why else, when her essay came in – misspelled, ungrammatical, poorly argued – did he give it a grade higher than it deserved?
She herself asked him that question, appearing in his office again a week or so after he’d handed it back. He’d made so many corrections in red pen – far more than she was used to from other tutors – that she knew his mark had been too generous, she said, and would like him to explain some of his marginal comments. She was wearing jeans with a black belt and a red-and-blue check shirt with the top two buttons undone. Unlike his colleagues, he always made marginal comments on student work, but it was true that he’d made more than usual on Corinne’s paper, not because it was especially bad but because he felt she had potential and needed encouragement, and perhaps, too, hard though it was to admit to himself, because he secretly hoped that the more oblique of the comments would produce exactly this result: the chance to see her again, one to one. They spent an hour going over the essay – forty-five minutes longer than he’d ever given any other student, and fifty-five above the recommended departmental limit for undergraduates. She’s a special case, he told himself, a single parent struggling to cope but driven by her desire for knowledge. His own desire didn’t come into it. The collarbone showing above her undone buttons; the anxious, am-I-good-enough smile; the dark green eyes (the same shade as Virago book jackets, he decided): he pretended not to see them, that they didn’t exist.
It became a pattern. She’d come to his office to discuss forthcoming assignments – to start with just those on his course, but soon enough those on other courses too. And after she’d done the assignments and had them back, she’d come again for clarification about his comments or, where the essay wasn’t for him, about the mark she’d been given. Over time, the marks improved. Her essays hadn’t been bad in the first place, just lacking in discipline. Now she was getting good grades, and not only from him. She challenged him over the justice of that. He had heard of students disputing their grades, but not when they’d been given As. He told her that. They joked about it. He loved it when she laughed.
She was a one-off. Which is why he longed to see her repeatedly. And did, platonically, for over two years.
The turning point came at the end of her third year. Exams were over, he’d done all his marking and she’d got her grades (all As and achieved on papers assessed by other colleagues, not him). It should have been a time to celebrate. She was wearing denim shorts and a pink gingham shirt, a relaxed, summery, end-of-term look. Yet she seemed more than usually stressed, fretting about which modules to take in her final year, and was no calmer by the time the hour was up (it was always an hour – ‘my shrink session’, she called it). Was anything wrong? he asked, at the end, seeing her reluctance to leave. Anything beyond the modules, all of which she’d be fine at, whichever she chose? She’d not been sleeping well, she said, the neighbour’s dog had been keeping her awake and she worried about her daughter, who was being bullied at school. On top of which, she was behind with the rent, her asshole ex having stopped his maintenance cheques after quitting his job and moving on without saying where – that’s how he was, a drifter, last heard of in Lexington, but that was months ago, he could be dead for all anyone knew and maybe it’d be better if he were, the way he was living he soon would be, crystal meth, crack, heroin, you name it, he’d been on it … While she talked he noticed something glistening on her left wrist, not the silvery pan-burn, which had long since cleared up, but a teardrop. And now another. And her eyes filling. And her droopy-shoulder helplessness. He stepped out from behind the safety barrier of his desk and pulled her to her feet, into a hug, so she could sob into his chest and he wouldn’t have to look at her looking at him looking at her, which had been adding to her distress. Her hair tickled the underside of his chin and he moved a hand to stroke it, and slid his knuckles gently up and down her cheek, the sort of comforting gesture he might have offered to anyone, but Corinne wasn’t anyone and holding her at all, let alone so tightly, with his hand on her cheek and her hair under his chin, was breaking the No Touching rule that was sacrosanct to the university, all universities, as he knew, as she surely knew too, but she’d the excuse of being distressed and disoriented, whereas he, as her teacher, in a position of authority … She was in his arms, quietly shaking, and he looking over her head at his poetry shelves wondering if any poet had ever described a situation of this kind, where a man flouts officialdom for the higher cause of consoling a creature in distress. What was he meant to do: stand aloof and send her off to Student Counselling? It was too late for that, and he went on stroking her cheek till she shifted her head slightly and brushed his knuckles with her lips, hardly a kiss – if all his senses hadn’t been so charged he might not have felt it – but the second time it was a kiss, moist, unmistakeable, and she began to kiss the tips of his fingers, and how could any man resist doing the next thing and pressing his mouth to her lips? And after that there was no stopping – they’d been denying themselves for so long, that was clear now, holding themselves at bay on opposite sides of the desk. But the desk was behind him now, literally, his coccyx hard up against the wood as they kissed and swayed, with all the months of Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, Woolf, Faulkner and Toni Morrison packed into their embrace, and there was no more talk from her about failing, and no more Beckett comeback from him about failing better, because their bodies had taken over and they’d dropped to the floor, and the thing they’d wanted but not intended was
about to happen, and did happen, in his office, on the rough blue carpet, both half dressed still but fully exposed – no secrets any more, no pretending, the only mystery was why it had taken so long.
Lying there, with his desk behind him, he suddenly laughed. What? she said, as though afraid he was mocking her. I won’t be teaching you next year, he said. You mean you won’t see me any more? she said, sitting up and buttoning her shirt. The opposite, he said, pulling her down again. I don’t teach on any of your options and I won’t be marking any of your work – we’re in the clear. How? To see each other, he said. If that’s what you want, she said, kissing him again, but then standing and pulling up her shorts and reaching for a tissue from her bag and readying herself to leave. Thank God one of them was being prudent, he thought, climbing to his feet and adjusting his clothes – most of his colleagues were already on vacation and the department was deserted, but you never knew who might choose to drop by.
In the clear. So they were, for the rest of the summer. They met in his office; at a motel on the other side of town; and when Rob’s landlord (a physics professor) and his wife were on holiday, at the house where he had lodgings. He went to her place once, too, the ‘scummy apartment’ (her phrase) she lived in with her daughter Maya. Introduced as ‘Mommy’s literature professor’, he entertained Maya with card games while Corinne cooked supper, not that playing rummy could be much fun for an eight-year-old American girl, but as Corinne said at least it stopped her watching TV. The three of them went swimming at a lake one day, and on another, in baking heat, took refuge in a cinema, where Home Alone was playing. Their time was necessarily limited (Corinne had Maya to look after and in August Rob spent two weeks back in England), but they’d have more once school resumed. Discretion was important, of course. But Rob felt he could handle that. It was only a year and then – who knows, if both of them still felt as they did – maybe they could move in together.
She was his age, or older, not a twenty-year-old. A parent and divorcee. Intellectually his equal, if not as well read. And he wouldn’t be teaching her or assessing her work.
In the clear. So they might have been, and should have been. But for a chance episode or chain of events. They were having coffee one afternoon, off campus (they always met off campus now; she no longer visited his room), when a young man came by, wheeling a bike and talking to another young man, only for one of them to drop a folder, right by the table where Rob and Corinne were sitting. Rob bent down and helped them retrieve the papers that had scattered from it, graphs and tables mostly. The two of them must be science students, he thought – neither looked familiar and though he noticed the boy with the bike stealing looks at Corinne that wasn’t uncommon, she was a striking woman after all.
He thought no more of it. The autumn semester was his busiest. And he’d been landed with an extra course that year, on Victorian literature, little of which he’d read (his expertise stopped round 1824, when Byron died). It meant a lot of extra reading, and midnight oil, and less time for Corinne, but she was busy too and they took their chances when they could. (If he’d had his wits about him, he’d have moved from the house of the physics professor and his wife and found a flat somewhere, but he’d committed himself to another year and didn’t want to upset them.) In late October the first batch of essays came in for the new course, a comparison of Tennyson and Browning. He marked them leniently by his standards, allowing for his own lack of expertise as well as that of the students, not all of whom were majoring in English. The only C he gave was to a student called Lisa Harding – the first couple of pages were largely plagiarised from a monograph he’d happened to read during his crash course on Victorianism, while the rest was a hotchpotch of misquotations. The girl came to see him after getting her grade. With her pigtails and dungarees – the sharecropper look, as he thought of it – she seemed an innocent, simply baffled to have done so badly and eager to learn how she might have done better. He took her through the essay, trying to explain and amplifying the marginal comments he’d made in red pen, some of them, in truth, not so much comments as exclamations – ! was a punctuation mark he used liberally. He interpreted her silence as proof that she was listening. At the end, though, she asked if he’d regrade her: she understood the essay wasn’t top-rank, she said, but a C was really harsh. No, the grade had already been registered, he said, but she shouldn’t worry too much, it counted for only a fifth of the course, if she concentrated she’d surely do better on the second essay and in the end-of-year exams. Yes, but where a student disputed a grade, an essay could be second-marked, she said: she’d read that in the student handbook. He had no experience of that, he said, no student he’d graded had ever asked to be reassessed before; from what he understood, it was a cumbersome process and the original grade was usually upheld – did she really want to bother, when the essay counted for such a small part of her final grade on the course, and the course such a small part of her overall degree? She certainly did want to bother, she said, her college career was important not just to her but to her parents, who’d borrowed money in order to subsidise it and had invested hope as well as dollars in her, and so far she’d repaid those hopes with As and high Bs. Well, if that’s what she wanted to do, he couldn’t stop her but … No, he couldn’t stop her, and she trusted he wouldn’t try to, since from what she understood he was pretty new to the American system – No offence, professor, but we’ve a different way of conducting ourselves here.
The phrase might have told him that there was more to this than a below-average student wanting to graduate with an above-average degree. But though he brooded about the exchange and how badly it had gone, and how her downtrodden sharecropper look had made him underestimate her, he didn’t think he’d underestimated the essay, which he’d read enough of again while taking her through it to be reminded of its inadequacy, to the point of wondering whether a D wouldn’t have been more apt, even if Ds, in the US, were unheard of. She took her essay away with a defiance he almost admired, but expected nothing to come of her appeal. Even when a message came from the head of department, Prof Cutler – ‘Chuck’ to all the staff – to ‘drop by’ for a meeting at 7.30 next morning, which since Rob had never been summoned in that way before, let alone at such an ungodly hour, he knew must be to discuss Lisa’s appeal, he wasn’t especially worried.
‘Sit down, Richard,’ Chuck said. He was a tall, barrel-chested, long-sideburned Texan in his fifties, who looked as if he ought to be out on the range or inspecting oil rigs in a Stetson, rather than sitting at a large desk heaped high with monographs about Christopher Marlowe.
‘Robert, actually.’
‘This Harding student – lousy essay, uh? Read it myself. Starts off OK –’
‘Though that part’s largely plagiarised.’
‘I see why you didn’t much go for it. Kid’s pretty angry with her C, though.’
‘She’s disappointed, naturally. I tried to show her where she fell short.’
‘Sure. All these exclamation marks, though …’ He held the essay up and chuckled. ‘You didn’t hold back, eh? Course, I see what you meant by them. But a kid like her, sensitive and all, well, what she sees is you calling her an idiot.’
‘I explained what was meant by them when she came to see me.’
‘But the damage was done. Look, it’s not the main issue here. I’m just saying – go easy on the exclamation marks, Robin!’
‘The main issue being whether to upgrade her, right?’
‘Yes and no. I had Prof Cartwright look at the essay. He once wrote a paper on Browning. Good man. He kind of agreed with you. But all things considered – to draw a line under it – given other matters – I’m gonna uphold the appeal and let the girl have a B.’
‘When you say other matters …?’
‘Well, now, this is damn awkward. See, the girl wrote me a letter as well. Questioning your objectivity in awarding grades is what it came down to. Alleging preferential treatment given in at least one case for r
easons not based on academic ability but because of a personal connection. Here, you’d better read her letter.’
It was written in ghoulish green ink and in an odd mix of babyish sanctimoniousness and legalistic abstraction. He felt a strange disgust as he read it, not at Lisa so much but at his relationship with Corinne as seen through her eyes. It was well known around campus that he’d had – and was still having – a sexually intimate relationship with one of his students, it said. Lisa’s own boyfriend had seen them behaving in a flagrantly inappropriate manner, in a café often patronised by students. The student in question had boasted to friends of getting extra coaching from him as well as A grades she didn’t deserve. She, Lisa, wasn’t fully acquainted with college regulations and would prefer to let the issue be dealt with by the department, but she felt it her moral duty to draw attention to Prof Pope’s behaviour, especially in the light of the unfair mark he had given her, which they now had the opportunity to ‘reassess’.
‘It’s blackmail,’ Rob said, handing back the letter.
‘But is it true?’
‘It’s true that I’m in a relationship with a mature student. But I don’t currently teach her or grade her work.’
‘But she’s a literature major.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ve taught her in the past.’
‘She was in my Romantic seminar in her freshman year.’
‘And the extra coaching?’
‘She came back to university after ten years out of school. She was struggling and I tried to help.’
‘You’ve never graded her work, you say?’
‘I marked a few essays in her freshman year, but in a four-year degree they don’t count for much overall.’
‘I’m well aware of that,’ Chuck said, suddenly angry, at Rob’s composure if nothing else. ‘I run the department, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
The Executor Page 6
