A Twice Told Tale

It is all so unfathomable, mutters the English Literature student as she slings her backpack over her shoulder and walks wearily down the fifth-floor hall. Yet another encounter, another fool for yet another day, another reason to berate herself over cigarettes half-smoked in the despair of trying to fall asleep. Repeating and repeating those silly words, you’re so good at them, she thinks, but another voice barks when she tries to clear her head of the shame, tries to empty her cheeks of the burning crimson. The voice barks shut up! For once, Yael, shut the **** up, try not to be the most brilliant version of your sorry self. She raises her eyes and enters the elevator, stiff upper lip, the English say, and the cruel associative train is once again on its determinate track. England is Oxford, and Oxford is her, and her is the conversation never begun and the letter already written.
Silly schoolgirl crushes had never been her thing. Intuition had been scorned at through years of peering through her mother’s scientific glasses at the way life was supposed to unfold. Yet the confrontation with this - this person - this paper model of a being - had brought about the double negative of crushing intuition to a student that had not done her homework. Upon meeting her new teacher at the beginning of her final year, all she had felt was discomfort. Discomfort upon suspecting that this teacher harbored a love of woman that was every bit as big as her own, upon feeling a reluctant admiration for this person that had accomplished what she herself was intent on - and at a much younger age than she herself would be able to manage. Sometime in her sleep, probably, she would never know exactly when, the discomfort had liquidized, churned its way through her stomach and into her heart, and taken the form of a strange intuition – hell, a knowledge – that something was meant to happen. And so the timer had been set, ticking away in its relentless mockery, unstoppable even at this very moment, as the digits on the elevator wall ooze from five to one, and she prays that it will never stop descending.

As the student walks to her car, she goes through the mental playlist of chastising anthems, the current number one still ringing in her ears. She could no longer count the embarrassing moments, her mouth had become so full of feet. There was the very beginning, when the teacher had politely declined to borrow a book offered with a stammer and a blush – couldn’t you have seen it then? True, you had felt her eyes upon you during class, but probably so had everyone else – teachers made eye contact. You had lingered after lessons, witty sentences racing through your mind, only to open your mouth and have those phrases trip and fall flat on their smug faces. Then there was the decision to change, to be what you thought the teacher wanted you to be. A diligent student – that was nothing new, so you had spent nights in front of your computer, fishing for relevant threads in that crazy web of information, sending her articles about whatever had been discussed in class, clinging to her laconic and correct replies – are you blind? – by reading them again and again, trying desperately to imagine what this crypt of a person was thinking. You stopped smoking for two whole weeks upon finding out that this teacher was a doctor’s daughter, and probably health-wary, only to be torn between elation and despair when you later watched her raise a cigarette to her lips. You tried to be butch, you tried to be femme, you went to a poetry reading knowing she wouldn’t be there and were so flabbergasted when she was that you could not sleep the entire night after for having dressed all wrong, for wondering who had been the woman sitting next to her.

The student reaches her little green car and climbs in. The ringing of those final words cannot stop and she stabs at her CD player, swearing to drown them out. I am in a little green car, she thinks, just like hers, just like hers. She had sat one Friday morning, months ago, on a bench in the middle of the city, and the teacher had driven by in a little green car, and waved. She had been too stunned to react, so stunned she had dropped the book she was reading at the time – Jude the Obscure (how fitting), the very book they were due to talk about in that teacher’s class the next week. By the time she had finished her errands and walked to her car, she could only slump her shoulders and sigh upon seeing the two little green cars parked within meters of each other. Walking down supermarket aisles, conducting conversations in her head, she had speculated on the foods that this teacher would like, the meals she would cook. It was all so silly, standing in front of the meat refrigerator weighing the options, and later in class, the teacher’s telling them she was a vegetarian. Watching the TV shows that she thought would interest her teacher, imagining them sitting on the sofa and laughing together, only to subsequently discover that this person did not even own a television set. Her head had been cluttered with piece upon piece of torn information until she had no longer been able to distinguish between fact and fantasy. Her intuition, the inexplicable feeling that something was meant to happen, had been dampened time and again by those bits of reality, yet was unwilling to die out. This goddamned intuition had cost her time, and tears, and great mortification.
Shaking her head, the student eases the car out of the lot, pointing its nose home. The ringing in her ears has stopped for the moment, and she gratefully opens the window to let in the warm breeze. The wind sweeps her hair off her forehead, and a faint whiff of perfume tickles her nose. The perfume she was wearing now was the same scent the teacher had been wearing that day at beginning of semester when they had been alone in her office. She had come to make changes to her schedule, and this teacher had been assigned the dubious privilege of English Department bureaucracy. She had waited patiently along with the other students in the hall, until finally her leaden legs could straighten and it was her turn to enter the office. She had noticed everything: the single white hair on the back of her teacher’s head, the shelves of books not yet full, the smell of CK One emanating from the University of Alabama sweatshirt. She had summoned up the courage to ask this thirty-year old Ph.D. where she had studied, and so Oxford had entered the picture. The student had then fallen silent, the silence turning into puzzlement and then into amusement as she registered the teacher’s shaking fingers, the inability to look her student in the eye, the confusion over index cards bearing students’ names. Smiling, the student had pointed out the card of the course she was interested in, twice overlooked by this young and impressive scholar.
The teacher had admitted to being no good at bureaucracy, and the student had walked away, feeling a strange euphoria – I make her nervous.

The car moves on as if by its own volition, taking the longer route through a road named after a unanimous genius so that her own nominated genius could possibly be spotted – her parents live on this street. The telephone book at home was worn on the page where the names of those two people were, those two anonymous people who had thirty years ago conceived this nightmare. As for the teacher herself – her name was not in the book, not on the site, all the means of modern information were the emblem of betrayal when it came to this infatuation. The trigger-happy facility of the send button… that letter, that sick, sick, letter. She had written it after yet another sleepless night, after a vivid dream of going into labor with the teacher’s baby, yet another modern impossibility in the age of the infinitely possible. Dazed, she had gotten up and typed, perhaps the first words in ages, and after twisting about for a while, been persuaded by a well-meaning if ignorant friend to click that damned button. click like the safety on a gun slipping out of its watch. And the two weeks of waiting for a reply, any reply, something, nothing, the two weeks had slid by with hair falling out, clutched in angst and remorse peppered with bright-eyed hope, all up in smoke. The response had been non-committal, non-remembered, she had looked straight into the teacher’s eyes and said: “fine. No problem,” when that intruded upon individual asked her to refrain from extra-curricular communication. But did that stop you, psycho? Did that stop you from programming her computer to flash ‘good luck’ when you learned she was going to present a paper at a conference? Did that stop you from dressing for her, coming to class early to savor every minute of her presence? No, if there is one thing you are, it is persistent.

The student parks her car in the lot of her apartment building, slowly opening the door, reluctant to get out. Home is books, home is having to write the paper, home is having to think about why the hell Henry James is so great. Home has mirrors and constant reminders of loneliness, home is where the teacher is not. Home is the internet, where the teacher’s name has been punched in incessantly, come on Yael, you can’t even remember what she looks like.

Try to remove yourself, physically, says the gray-bearded man that visits her every now and again. He has slanty eyes and what we call aged wisdom, but those eyes are enough. The student places herself in the middle of a green exercise mat, precisely in the middle, and thinks of agency. This Abs sculptor will be the agent of my stomach’s shrinkage, this mattress will be the agent of my physical well-being, and somehow, I will get through to her. I can’t be so wrong, puffs the student as her chin shakingly points above bended knees, when have you ever been right? Returns the neck gratefully to the elbow-checked rest.

How painfully amused you were when you spotted two students that are currently taking her class, one reading over and over the comments the teacher made, the other flinging carelessly over her shoulder: “you’re obsessed”, and both of you looked up with terrible eyes, and the other student said, while you only thought: “I know.” How deliciously jealous you were of your compulsion, not wanting to share in the pain of excess. If so, it was not only she that was lost, but your fantasy too, pushed aside by others’ ambitions to be mongrel of the month. Bah to it all! You were the instigator of the Ambiguous Persons’ fan club, and the claims, the copyright, the stamp of shame all rightfully earned, no strings attached, especially not those tied to any form of reality. Scornful, the student rises from the mat, all puffed out of breath and the will, and sits at the screen once again. Her fingers ache and she types as if blind, once again, once again, the name and the shift-2 with the dot and the com (If I plot will she come?). But regret is one of the more fortunate feelings, special in that its exquisite torment is short-lived, quickly absconding to its cousin shame, and not easy to call back.

Thankfully, the student enters the shower. The hot water drums on her head like too much Derrida and she can no more understand its rhythm than she can her own mood swings. Hurrah for clarity! There is comfort in knowing that shampoo comes in blue, there is solace in rain that comes only when wanted. Live on, unequivocal facts! Relish what you know, cherish what is true, and again, it is not much more than the smell of shampoo, or a wet towel not nearly dry enough from an earlier encounter. No more ambiguity, no more confusion, I will from now on stick to the facts, she thinks. There is a consolation in fact, but that it gives rise to fiction, and herein is the problem, to misquote Alanis. But at least night has fallen and there is no light for colors. Colors like crimson or bright-red or green. One more day gone by, she says to herself. One more day, and not an embarrassment to speak of, you’ve restrained yourself again from writing a letter or sending a flower or finding a number or slitting your wrists. And humanity is all about restraint, is it not? It is all so unfathomable, says the newest recruit of Ambiguity Anonymous, as she lays her head down to think inexpedient thoughts.