by Teddy Wayne
Your eyes flitted around us, indicating you knew what I was about to bring up and that we shouldn’t discuss it in the open, especially not with Tom nearby. Your signal was unnecessary: you could trust me not to blurt out anything confidential.
“Do you need any help?” I whispered.
“I’m taking care of it,” you said casually.
“Remember, you can bring me along as a personal advisor. Or if you just need moral support.”
You waited for the group ahead of us to move on. “They actually told me I shouldn’t be discussing it. So the best thing you could do for me is to respect that.”
“Got it.” I nodded. “Well, keep me posted.”
“No, you don’t get it,” you said. “I’m asking you—I’m telling you, this conversation is over. I can’t be talking about this with anyone.” You looked straight into my eyes. “Do you read me?”
Od uoy daer em?
“Of course,” I said. “I completely understand.” I bet no one else knew about it, not even Suzanne. Only me.
Reading period commenced a few days later. An unstructured week to study before the rude arrival of finals, its longueurs felt like a never-ending Sunday afternoon. My room was devoid of activity; Steven had begun a codependent relationship with the one female member of his magic club and alighted at home only for changes of clothes. The library was crowded with students who flocked to the communal tables like pigeons to bread crumbs. Even sequestered in the privacy of a carrel, I found it difficult to focus; the floor and walls seemed to vibrate with the buzz of their prattling. I brought my work to Annenberg, where I continued to dine solo, a quarantined patient. The social fluidity of September had frozen into compartmentalized ice cubes; fixed units of freshmen, strangers a short three months ago, now bantered with the glib repartee of news anchors between segments.
I didn’t see you at any meals, but a lot of students were skipping them to prepare for finals.
And so what; I’d have you to myself soon enough, after the last essay had brought us closer together. The others were movie extras, background noise. Pure staffage in our landscape.
One evening Scott Tupper cut ahead of me in line for soda. I let it go, but an hour later, back in my room, I set up a fake e-mail account and wrote an anonymous, scathing character assassination, telling him one of his childhood victims knew where he lived.
I couldn’t find his e-mail address in the student directory. Searching for him on Facebook didn’t turn up anyone in the Harvard network, either. There was a guy with his name associated with the University of Vermont, though. I clicked on the profile.
It was Scott.
He looked similar to the pug-nosed guy at Harvard, just with longish hair. But the real Scott Tupper, as his Facebook page would have you believe, had become a budding left-wing intellectual; his interests included Marx and Noam Chomsky, and all the links he posted were to articles about social justice and the evils of corporate influence.
Naturally he’d be going to a state school.
I received back my graded “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?: The Self as Staffage in Emily Dickinson” essay. The sentences were massacred with red ink. “Some interesting insights, but an incoherent argument,” my TF had written on the last page. “B–.”
My first B. Not just at Harvard (where I’d been pulling off As and A minuses), but in my entire academic career. I’d rather have gotten an F. Absolute failure could be indicative of unappreciated genius. Mediocrity wasn’t.
It was because I’d put all my best thinking into your paper. Fortunately, there was still the final essay. This time I’d prioritize my own work to prove that the B minus was a fluke, that I was indeed one of the most gifted students Mrs. Rice had encountered in her twenty-four years teaching English at Garret Hobart High. I decided to write about the troika of The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and the course’s namesake poem, furiously banging out pages of shorthand ideas about Europe and America, old money and new money, gentiles and Jews, the plainspokenness of Hemingway as masculine cover for his cerebral vocation, Fitzgerald’s lyricism and Eliot’s classicism as a doubling down on their effeteness.
But when I tried to compose the first draft, I struggled to transform my notes into a coherent argument, let alone a cogent, nuanced one executed in a fancy prose style. To procrastinate, I ended up translating the complete document of stray thoughts in reverse. I encountered a similar block for my other classes’ essays, too. All I could think about was how, once I saw you again, we would pick up on what we’d done that night in my room.
I roamed around the River Houses one night until I heard the sounds of a party. I waited until a resident opened the door, followed the music, and entered the congested suite. There wasn’t anyone I recognized. I stood by the alcohol, refilling each cup as soon as I’d emptied it, and stayed till the end. No one spoke to me.
Reading week was drawing to a close and you hadn’t reached out yet to schedule our next session. I e-mailed you:
Just checking in about when you wanted to work on our Prufrock essays together. I’m free whenever.
I stayed up until four in the morning waiting for your reply. It wasn’t there when I awoke at noon, either. Maybe you were neglecting your in-box as you took care of finals. Nonetheless, it was inconsiderate. I was offering my services; you could at least have had the courtesy to tell me when you were available.
I needed to run into you on campus. But I hadn’t seen you in the dining hall the whole week, and I couldn’t stand by your room, obviously. I would have to intercept you before or after one of your exams.
I checked the syllabus for Gender and the Consumerist Impulse. In lieu of an exam was a final paper (the “anthropological study requiring local fieldwork”) due in your professor’s mailbox that day by five o’clock. It was already 2:30 but, knowing you, you’d hand it in under the wire; I could linger by the mailboxes, pretending I was there for some other purpose.
I jogged over to Boylston Hall, found the correct mailbox, and sifted through the essays to confirm that yours wasn’t there yet. But it was—near the top of the stack:
A QUID PRO QUO:
A Market-Based Study of Fe(male) Sexual Transactions
by Veronica Wells
If only I’d remembered the syllabus an hour earlier, I would’ve been there when you dropped it off. The one consolation was that I could now read what you’d written: “sexual transactions” sounded intriguing.
Students and faculty trickled by, all consumed with their own urgent end-of-semester business. I snatched the paper and hurried downstairs to the basement, avoiding the dangerous space of the BGLTQ lounge, and cloistered myself in a stall in the men’s room.
“If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.”
—Emma Goldman, “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” (1906)
Introduction
Though Hollywood would have us believe that all we seek in romantic relationships is love, it is just one of several exchangeable commodities, along with sex, money, status, validation, services, and so on. While I have long been aware of—and troubled by—the transactional nature of relationships, I have been as susceptible to this dynamic as anyone else.
On September 4, I became acquainted with a male member of Harvard’s senior class (“Alpha”). There was a mutual attraction and we began dating. Within a few weeks, the terms of the transaction were glaringly apparent. Aware of his high market value in the heteronormative undergraduate social economy, Alpha conducted himself in a manner suggesting that his status and finances would satisfy all my relationship needs.
They did not; I found the relationship lacking in several crucial respects. Rather than extricate myself, however, I decided to study it through an anthropological and economic lens. As part of this e
xploration, I have included a log of our noteworthy interactions, the money Alpha spent on me, and our sexual encounters (intercourse, fellatio, and/or cunnilingus). An annotated analysis of the transactions composes Part 2 of this study, in which I consider which commodities influence the power dynamic of a relationship; how each partner calculates the costs and benefits of a given transaction; and the transactional relationships among money, sex, and status.
Part 1: Beta
A few days into my study of Alpha, I became acquainted with a freshman male (“Beta”). On October 5, he offered to help me work on an essay due in a class we shared. I realized that I did not have a comparison subject for Alpha, who was receiving various commodities from me, just as I was from him. What if I entered into a Platonic relationship with a lower-value male that exclusively benefited me? To what lengths would Beta extend himself for the presumptive possibility of sex? How might it refract the power dynamic between Alpha and me?
I expanded the ambit of my study to include Beta. With no suggestions on my end of sexual reward, he voluntarily wrote two essays for me in clear violation of the Honor Code.1 Despite the fact that we were not in a sexual relationship, Beta began to act in much the same entitled, possessive manner as Alpha, subjecting me to disturbing levels of surveillance in a number of episodes. A more thorough examination of our relationship is in Part 3.
Beta’s behavior in the early stages made me uneasy, and I attempted to end our association prior to the second essay he wrote for me; in spite of this, he was adamant about maintaining it. But after an incident in which he followed me around New York City, I felt unsafe in his presence and withdrew from him before his expectation of sex became unmanageable.
* * *
1 I wrote my own papers before our meetings and did not, of course, submit either of his, which suffered from retrograde ideas and stilted prose, as if he thought he could browbeat me into admiring submission with overwrought sentence constructions and baroque vocabulary.
Insert an empty page for my restroom-stall silence, printer.
My thighs atrophied. I sat down on the toilet seat before reading the rest, which was more of the same. Then I reread the whole thing. Each time my eyes passed over the word Beta, it was as if an organ were surgically extracted from me without anesthesia and deposited on the operating table so I could witness my own vivisection.
Someone entered the restroom, unzipped, urinated, whistled, zipped, flushed, turned on the faucet, turned off the faucet, crank-crank-cranked the paper-towel dispenser, ripped, dried, tossed it in the trash, and left to go on with his day—his world as intact upon departure as it was on arrival.
I struggled to stand; my legs had fallen asleep. The pins and needles were the only sign that I was still inhabiting my body, which seemed to belong to another person wobbling in the narrow stall.
Feet tingling, essay in pocket, I left the building. It was barely four o’clock but the streetlights were already on, the sky a metallic pink as the first flurry of the season fell, ashen flakes that melted upon contact with the ground. I was walking back to Matthews when I realized I didn’t want to be in my room, didn’t want to be on campus at all, so I turned south through the tranquil Yard and into the bustle of Harvard Square, past storefronts winking with Christmas lights, past two kids sticking out their tongues to catch the snowflakes, past a Salvation Army Santa Claus ringing a bell, past a fire truck with a wreath on the grill ambling down Mass Ave.
Beta. That’s all I was to you. Beta. That’s all I was.
No particular destination in mind, I kept walking. Halfway across the Anderson Memorial Bridge, I paused to read a small plaque embedded in the brick wall.
QUENTIN COMPSON
Drowned in the odour
of honeysuckle
1891–1910
A fictional character had left more of a literal mark on this place than I ever would.
DAVID FEDERMAN
Wasn’t here
August–December
Freezing gusts of winter unfurled off the river. I opened up the contacts on my phone. No need to scroll; the entire list fit on one screen: Anna, Dad, Miriam, Mom, Sara Cohen.
“David, hi, I’m in the middle of something. Can I swing by your office in five?” answered my mother.
“Mom?” I said, confused. “It’s me. David.”
“Oh!” She laughed. “I saw your name and thought it was David Franklin at my firm. I didn’t call you, did I?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s nice to hear your voice.” Her keyboard clacked in the background. “How’re finals?”
“Fine,” I said.
Rustling papers. “Busy studying?”
“Mmhuh.”
“It sounds windy. Are you outside?”
“Just taking a little break outside the library.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Sorry, I was talking to someone else. I hope you’re not too stressed out.”
“I’m not. I’m about to meet my friends for dinner.”
“Oh, good,” she said. “What do you call yourselves, again? The Matthews Martyrs?”
“Marauders.”
“Of course, the Marauders.” She laughed again. “Excuse me.”
“I should probably get going,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “Remind me what day you’re taking the bus?”
I didn’t answer.
“David? I can’t hear you.”
My breathing became jerky. I moved the phone away from my mouth.
“You still there?”
“I’m here,” I said, my voice catching in my throat.
“David,” she said in a tone she hadn’t used since I was a child. “Are you crying? Did something happen?”
“There’s this girl.” I choked on the rest of the sentence.
“A girl?” She waited. “Is it a girlfriend?”
“No,” I said. “She didn’t want to be.”
“Oh, David,” she clucked. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could reach through the phone right now and give you a hug.”
The skyline slackened and quivered. The lights dancing off the river blurred into a shiny nimbus.
“I know it’s hard to believe this, because it feels awful now, but you’ll get over it,” she said. “I was so heartbroken over this boy my freshman year of college, I hardly ate for weeks. And now I can’t even remember his name!”
The snow began sticking. The squeak of windshield wipers could be heard as traffic slowed.
“Have you talked about this with your friends?” she asked.
When I didn’t answer she continued. “I know you’re a private person, but it’s important not to let these things simmer inside. This might sound silly, but I read an article that said if you’re upset with someone, a good thing to do is write them a letter expressing your feelings, but don’t send it. Just for yourself. It can help you get closure.”
I wiped my nose on my sleeve and blinked the world back into focus.
“Did I lose you?” she asked.
I cleared my throat and filled my lungs with cold, clarifying air.
“That’s a good idea,” I said, heading back to campus. “Closure.”
Chapter 16
I feel like we left things a little unresolved,” I began. “I was hoping to get some closure.”
“How generous of you to include me,” Sara said.
It had taken four days of e-mails to persuade her to meet me; on top of her reasons for not wanting to see me again, finals were now upon us. But she had at last consented to talk, briefly, in a public location.
We sat at our usual table at Starbucks. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” jingled over the café’s sound system. Our drinks steamed from festively decorated cups. A toddler parked in a stroller at the next ta
ble rooted through a shopping bag at her feet while her mother vertically caressed the screen of her phone.
“I don’t blame you for being mad at me,” I went on. “I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I’ve come to realize you were right.”
Sara leaned back, crossed her arms, and let out a skeptical sigh.
“About something being wrong with me,” I said. “There is. Sort of.”
Her forehead crinkled in confusion.
“You said I was missing whatever it is that makes someone feel things for other people,” I reminded her. “But it’s there—it’s just hard to see, sometimes even for me. Underneath this affectless exterior lies a deeply sensitive being.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, please.”
“That’s your line,” I said. “At the Ice Cream Bash. Except you said pleasant exterior and antisocial being. Then you made a joke about being a psychopath.”
“Right.” A reluctant nod. “You have a good memory.”
“About us,” I said. “I remember everything. All the plays and lectures you took me to. Our study sessions at Lamont, and here. Our first date, at that salsa class. When we danced so beautifully.”
A twitch of a smile. I pressed on.
“The very first time I met you, outside Matthews. You picked up my orientation packet that had fallen and you had sunscreen all over your face. Then you came over to say hello in the basement meeting, but I was too nervous to talk.”
The toddler next to us howled in protest as her mother pried a new pair of socks from her hands. She was quickly pacified with a cookie the size of her face.
“The other reason I wanted to meet is there’s something I need to say to you,” I said. “Something I wasn’t up front about that’s been weighing on my conscience. It’s not easy for me to talk about this, but you deserve to know.”
