That was the moment he— What would be the right phrase? “Fell in love with her” is ridiculous. It was the moment after which he found himself thinking about her much of the time. He no longer had to wonder where the warning bells were. He was fixated on one of his students! How pathetic!
Ah, maybe “fixated on her” is the right phrase.
For the rest of the semester he forced himself to address both sides of the lecture hall, and yes, he always noted when she arrived and where she sat, and when she chewed on her pen, and when she stopped taking notes. (Was he nattering on?) He hoped she wouldn’t ask him any more questions and he also hoped she would. (She didn’t.) He had two more dreams involving her, neither of them erotic, but unusually vivid. In one of them he and she were in a hot-air balloon under a lurid sky, and he wanted to descend while she wanted to rise. In the other he was stretching a carpet while she was sitting on it, but for some reason that was helping rather than hindering him. He woke up from both dreams with an erection but, to repeat, all REM sleep induces erections.
He read her final exam, and was again impressed by her intelligence. More than that, she displayed an imaginative engagement with the material that suggested she might make a good astronomer. He worried that she would take the companion course in the spring, then was disappointed when she didn’t. He went so far as to inquire with the registrar and was informed she had taken a leave of absence. He wondered what that implied, but restrained himself from looking further. He did not want to make a complete fool of himself.
Sometime in March he found a note from her in his faculty mailbox.
Hi Prof Fuller,
I don’t know if you remember me, I was in your intro course last semester, I’m the one who paraded my soupçon of knowledge about Tycho Brahe in front of the class at your first lecture. I’m taking a break this semester and frankly contemplating not coming back, I liked a couple of my courses but I’m not sure I can bear to jump through all those hoops just for that piece of paper, most of my life I’ve been mostly self-educated and I also have issues with authority figures that probably don’t serve me well, but there you go. Anyway, I wanted to say that your course was my favorite, and I also liked the way you taught it, you seemed unpompous and kind for a professor, though I’m probably breaking protocol here. But now that I’ve broken it, I’m wondering if you’d ever like to get together for coffee or tea, I don’t know anyone else who’s interested in astronomy the way I’ve been for as long as I can remember. You can see from my address that I live in the area, and I can come into town most days. Let me know. Or not!
Saskia (White)
Two or three weeks went by during which he pretended to have qualms. Then he called the number she’d written below her name. They met at a coffee shop and talked for three hours. Some of the thoughts he remembers going through his head on that bright cold April afternoon in the booth by the streaky picture window:
Her mind worked much faster than his.
It reminded him of Susan.
She wasn’t his student now.
She was twenty-two.
Twenty-two is way more than half of thirty-four.
When they parted outside she said, “That was a lot of fun.”
He said, “For me, too.”
She said, “You’re sweet.”
He stood like an ox, saying nothing.
She turned abruptly. “Call me again.” This was over her shoulder, as she walked away. “Or not!”
He watched her recede down the long sidewalk, moving faster than everybody else, including people with longer legs, which was everybody else.
2006
Back in the sixties, when Mark was a boy, his family rarely ate out. However, occasionally they would go to the Pacific Hut at the Burlington Mall. Compared to the brightly lit concourse, the restaurant was murky. Photographs of thatched huts were framed in bamboo stalks the size of bass flutes, and similarly large bamboo halves covered the panels dividing the booths. His sister would sing under her breath, “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip . . .”
Whenever his family went anywhere, they always did exactly what they did the last time they were there. At the Pacific Hut, he and Susan would share a Pu Pu Platter. His mother would get the Tahitian lobster and say that it wasn’t as good as the lobster at the Willow Pond Kitchen, but it wasn’t bad. His father would order the Sweet and Sour Chicken, and Mark would be struck anew by the velvety DayGlo-orange sauce draped over the golden puffs of batter.
That was his entire childhood experience with the kind of food his family referred to as Chinese, though he later supposed it was Americo-Sino-Hawaiian. It wasn’t until freshman year of college that he was taken by worldly classmates to a Cantonese restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown, where he looked on agog as they wielded chopsticks with the skill of his father wrangling a slide rule. According to some prior agreement he wasn’t party to, they shared all the dishes, and the platters quickly emptied to the sound of clacking pincers while he chased a slippery snow pea pod around his plate. He pocketed a pair of the disposable chopsticks and over the next few days practiced in the freshman dining hall until he was adept at picking up single grains of rice.
He sometimes remembered this when he was busy in his university office in the evening and decided to order takeout. The Wok Inn was a mile from campus, tucked away in
