![]() In high school, shy and a “late bloomer,” I’d been mostly invisible to boys. If it’s possible to be two things at once, I was both pathologically insecure and intoxicated by the power that my newly discovered desirability to men seemed to have conferred on me. My father was a cellist, and my mother a writer of art-related books. I was also angry at my family and the pressure I felt all of them put on me to be “perfect” and impressive-or, at least, I was as angry at my family as I was at myself for not being those things-and therefore all the more drawn to X’s radical politics and irreverent attitude, which seemed to repudiate everything that my high-culture-loving parents had raised me to revere. ![]() I attached flirtatious notes to the piles of books he asked me to retrieve for him at the library, and sat down right next to him at the polished-wood table where he conducted his seminar. Really, I thought I’d never met such a clever and glamorous man and I made no effort to hide the crush I had on him. He was also tall, with tenebrous good looks, and he laughed easily, as if the very business of life were an elaborate joke. X had a slow and measured manner of speaking that put me at ease, along with a calm confidence that I lacked and found magnetic. Which was the fantasy that underpinned all my other fantasies, even as I lived in fear of appearing needy.īut that was only part of it. ![]() I think I had the idea that, if I could get X to worry about me, he’d want to take care of me. On account of his age and perceived authority, I suppose I saw X as a substitute parental figure, especially since confiding in my own parents had proved to be a fraught activity. Why, after lengthy deliberation, I’d decided to disclose such a closely held secret to someone who was neither a trusted friend nor a mental-health professional was a more complicated question. I never found out who the filmmaker was, but the idea that an associate of his regarded the topic as worthy of further inquiry made me feel a little less ashamed. “No.” I recall laughing to break the suddenly sombre mood-also with relief that he didn’t seem to have judged me.Īfter a smoke-filled pause, he told me that someone he knew was making a film about the topic. “Do you want me to think you’re pathetic?” In the manner of a therapist (or Socrates), X often replied to my questions with other questions. I remember following up my confession with a question: “Do you think I’m pathetic?” I had started smoking a year before as a way of dealing with the nagging questions of what to do with my hands, how to suppress my appetite, and, above all, how to give myself the appearance of someone who stood aloof from the petty squabbles of everyday life-though nothing could have been further from the truth. Sometimes, when I visited X in his office on the top floor of a Victorian building near the Arts Quad, as I began to do after class, he’d ask if he could have one of my Marlboro Lights. And you could still smoke cigarettes anywhere you wanted to. X himself was on leave from another élite university. He was also married, but his wife was teaching and living elsewhere. He was almost a decade and a half my senior. X, as I’ll call him, had hired me in conjunction with the “work-study” program, which was available to students who received financial aid. A junior at Cornell, I had just turned twenty. Not long after I became my professor’s research assistant, I told him that I sometimes threw up what I ate. ![]()
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