There’s this poet I know who speaks highly of you. I think I fell in love with him that time he brought a picnic basket to class and sat beside me like nothing was wrong. The wicker had a gentle crinkling sound that made me smile, despite myself. After retrieving his notebook, he brushed some old crumbs off of its surface and onto my jeans, like an absentminded god sprinkling snow on a lake. He only felt the need to justify his actions after examining my bemused expression. “I never get to use it in the winter!” was the explanation he chose, and the glossiness of his dark eyes boring into mine reminded me of a photo of Gene Kelly I had seen on the wall of an old movie theatre. He looked too shiny to be real, his gaze at once engaging and inexplicably vacant.
We were studying creative writing, but he had nothing to learn, everyone could tell. During class workshops I would try to find one miniscule detail in his prose that I did not admire, but I could never fault his words without feeling dishonest. I usually picked a sentence at random and told him he might consider adding a comma, if he thought it necessary. He always looked through me when he said, “Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.” He rarely took the note, but I didn’t mind. I recognized that it was a privilege to come into contact with his work, even the pieces that were entirely facetious. Those days when he abandoned his typical pretense of superiority were my favourites, because oftentimes he smiled wide enough that I could see his crooked teeth, or smell the gum on his breath. It was disturbing and glorious, being reminded that his life, his mortality, was so proximate to mine.
The first time I heard him laugh was Valentine’s Day. It was during our poetry unit; we had a class dedicated to the sonnet form. Before the lecture began, I was sitting in wait when he burst through the door, wearing an uncharacteristic grin and a robe in place of a coat. Holding a pencil in one hand and a cluster of looseleaf paper in the other, he took his seat next to me. I asked him gently what all the show of happiness was for. With an unrelenting smile plastered across his face, he told me that he had not slept the whole night, that he had written fourteen sonnets about our professor, and that he wanted to read all of them to me.
Professor Woodgate was a brittle woman. A preponderance of wrinkles somewhat softened her angular features, but the grey bob that enclosed her bony face made her strikingly gaunt, even on sunny days. He dedicated his brutish sonnets to her sagging breasts, to the bunions on her toes, to the cataracts clouding her eyes. They varied greatly in tone and quality. I could easily discern which ones were composed first, despite the cluttered arrangement of the papers which were wet and splotchy from the snow outside. In an attempt to respond appropriately to each poem, I did not show any genuine emotion on my face. Instead, I waited to let out a laugh until he lifted his eyes from the page expectantly, only stopping when he appeared satisfied with the reaction. The sonnets concerned me, not for wanting rhyme or rhythm, but for their slow thematic transition from cruelly comedic to excruciatingly erotic. Throughout the reading, his performance became increasingly convincing, so that the colour of my blushing cheeks deepened to match the rouge of his fingers, still raw from the cold. As he neared the end of the fourteenth piece, his breath became laboured and his voice grew low. I had to lean toward him to hear his words above the chatter of other students. Closing his eyes on the final word, he sunk into his chair. I excused myself for a drink of water.
After class that day I went to the restroom to examine myself in the mirror. By this time, I knew about his obsession with you, and assumed that he might have harboured attraction for our ancient professor due to her similarly cropped hairstyle. Pulling at my face and neck, I cursed my soft jaw and large, dimpled chin for their incompatibility with Jazz Age beauty standards. Words and phrases from his sonnets kept flashing through my head, and my eyes began to sting as if I had been staring directly into a spotlight. Recalling an instance earlier in the school year wherein he compared Professor Woodgate’s age to that of Edna St. Vincent Millay and whispered to me, “Imagine her in a speakeasy,” I wondered whether the image I had conjured in my mind resembled his imagination at all. His voice resonated inside my head with such a buzz that I felt I might begin to vibrate. Through trembling lips I loudly hummed the first song that came to mind. Droning on, I forgot to worry about cutting my hair. Singin’ in the rain…just siiingin’ in the rain…what a glooorious feeling…
The unease with which I approached him dwindled across the subsequent weeks, until my feelings of admiration fully returned in the springtime. He told me he liked to hone his craft by addressing letters to dead people and leaving them unsent. I asked him if he would write my obituary. “How morbid…” was his entire response. My feelings for him had become an irritating habit that I could not control. Lovesickness weighed me down, it sat on my shoulders and pushed on my head and made my eyes droop when I watched him recite his work aloud. There was a blooming pear tree visible through the window of the classroom, and on windy days I would fix my drooping eyes on the quivering fruit, following its trajectory from the branch to the grass. I imagined how liberating it would feel to hit the ground with such clarity, to hear the thud of your own weight against reality, to know there was no further you could possibly fall.
At the end of the semester our program hosted a prom, which I thought was quite juvenile but nevertheless felt I needed to attend. I knew I could never ask him to go with me—he had made it clear that he meant to arrive solo—but I thought perhaps if I dressed like you, I could catch his attention. I borrowed my grandmother’s preferred lipstick, which tasted like envelope glue and made smiling a tricky endeavour. The colour was a hideous pink that would probably look appropriate on elderly ladies whose complexions resemble golden raisins, but I, with my rosy cheeks and full lips, appeared the image of a circus clown in my foggy mirror. My outfit, a white flapper-style dress with layers of shimmering fringes, should have distracted from the makeup, but it was thrifted, and a size too large, so that it hung awkwardly and made my body take on a somewhat rectangular shape. While curling my hair I burned three of my fingers, and bit my lip to keep from wailing. I felt it was worth it in the end because the tight ringlets were the only successful aspect of the attempted imitation. On the way to the dance I tried not to think about the width of my chin.
The ballroom excited me, despite the pathetic decorations. By the time I arrived, the floor was already populated with dancers and talkers and those in between. Crepe paper had been haphazardly pasted on the walls of exposed brick, and there was a banner hanging above the stage that read “Congradulations!” Immediately upon entering I tried to find him. I hoped to catch him dancing, to see him recklessly swaying or shuffling his clumsy feet. I scanned the room while I made my way to the open bar and ordered a glass of red wine (it seemed like a drink you might have enjoyed). Eventually, I saw that he had planted himself on the sidelines, against the brick. I knew that was where he meant to stay for the evening. Once, in class, I asked him what he liked to do for fun, and he said he liked to observe people. He said it added a dimension of honesty to his written work. In my silly costume, I approached him wordlessly, attempting to decipher the colour of his suit under the glaring neon lights. I felt sure that it was either navy blue or black, so I asked him which it was. All he said was “Green.”
He held the stem of his glass like it was a pen, and rarely raised it to his lips. I took constant sips to compensate, although I detested the bitter taste. Each time I drank I attempted to subtly flourish my hips to elicit a swishing sound from my ill-fitting, overpriced vintage dress. He talked without turning to face me. Standing unsteadily on his right side, I swirled my wine and tried to smile through my sticky pink lips. I struggled to follow his conversation, finding more enjoyment in examining the curvature of his nose and trying to find crooked teeth each time he opened his mouth. He moved his head continuously while he spoke, the volume of his voice increasing and decreasing like a heartbeat. I could only discern half of each phrase. After a few minutes of talking to himself, I heard him say “Save Me the Waltz” and replied “Okay!” without understanding that he was not asking a question. I felt a rush of pleasure watching the confusion that grew over his face, knowing I had caused him to react, and to meet my eyes with his glossy black stare. I could see the exact moment when he registered my response—the smirk that crept across his lips made my burnt fingers suddenly ache. He shifted his wine glass from his right hand to his left and dropped his free arm loosely between us. While he held my gaze, his fingers found the two equidistant dimples on my lower back, and uneasily settled into the groove of those soft indents. He tapped at them quickly and somewhat hesitantly, like a child testing the temperature of a pool before diving in. The white fringes on my dress danced excitedly in response to his touch. I remained silent. As he moved his head slightly closer to mine, I saw Professor Woodgate standing by the door and jerked my arm upward against the wall. The collision was so thoughtlessly violent; the brick seemed to harbour no sympathy for my clumsily occupied hand.
In an instant, the glass shattered, sprinkling shards of crystal in my hair and across the floor. Although the bowl had been irreparably destroyed, the stem and base remained mostly intact, firmly in my clutches. Red wine spilled down my arm and along my body. It looked as if I had been stabbed, the way the liquid pooled across my white dress. He was mostly unscathed by the accident, but I thought the wine dripping from his fingers suggested shared culpability. Listening to the constant patter of spillage on the wooden floor, I stood in shock. He observed my silence without showing any emotion on his face. A moment passed, he regained his composure, then he raised his right hand to gesture toward my glimmering ringlets.
“Like drops of dew…”
I could not control the tears running down my rosy cheeks, could not pause to brush them aside. I remember thinking how much heavier they were than the wine which had not stopped falling from my forearm to the floor. I looked down to conceal the deluge, and from underwater the splintered pen in my grasp took on the shape of a tree, still standing erect, boasting jagged bark and rustling leaves. I pressed my thumb hard in between the sharp branches, hoping to jostle some pears to the ground, and their red juices flowed down from my hand to my arm to commingle with your drink. My head had nearly drowned by then, but I swear through the water I heard him whisper your name. Glancing up at him, my hands aflame, I caught his eyes glowing. Their usual glossiness momentarily disrupted, I knew what I saw was a reflection of that fire.
That was last week. I haven’t been able to think about anything else since. All this to say, thank you for putting that light in his eyes.
Love,
yours truly
