Want, стр. 33

my chest and my skin still sticky—I say, you’ll find some girl who smiles and wears appropriate things. (He had to pull my wool cap off my head half an hour into the party.) She’ll be complacent, easy, a little doughy, I say. She’ll not be terrified of lipstick or that gunk I think I might need to start rubbing underneath my eyes. She’ll devote her whole self to you, I say. She’ll be interesting but never threatening. You’ll love her hard and often right up to the point that you’re disgusted by the person you’ve become.

We lie a long time, awake but not talking. He climbs down from the bed and takes the baby from me, brings her to her bed. I listen as he pours himself a glass of water. He climbs back up, separate from me. I listen as his eyes close and his breathing shifts and he falls asleep.

For our last session of my night class, I take my students out for drinks. This was common when I was a student in this program. It’s grad school and all the rules are loose and fluid. Students ply me with drinks and then say the things they have perhaps thought all semester but have not been able to say in class. Four of them have cried at office hours. I’m the least threatening of all of their professors, a bit more mom than not. I want to give them whatever it is they want for me to give them. But then sometimes what they want is not a thing that anyone could give.

My boss got drunk and tried to kiss me, whispers a girl, her words slurring, who writes often about a trauma she experienced the year she turned sixteen. I had to ride home in a cab with him and take him up to his apartment because I didn’t think he’d make it home and then he tried to kiss me and now I’m scared I’ll lose my job.

Do you think I’m dumb? asks a young girl who writes about death and, once, a strange, riveting piece about a slaughterhouse.

Of course not, I say, meaning it.

People think I’m dumb a lot, she says.

She’s blond and pretty, sweet-looking.

I never thought that you were dumb.

At some point, the name of the man my former student mentioned months ago comes up. He shouldn’t be a teacher, says one of my male students.

He’s disgusting, says another one.

He tells girls in office hours that he’s in an open marriage, says one girl.

He belittles women, says another.

He’s fucked up.

I’ve had two bourbons and am not sure what to say to all of this. No one has so far offered a specific accusation. I’m not sure how to answer. I’m not sure what’s allowed.

I’m sorry, I say. Has anyone said anything to anyone higher up?

One of the girls, who every class has lined eyes and lined lips and is much smarter than I thought she was when I first met her, says, Someone tried to report it to the heads of the department but they shut them down.

What do you mean? I say. What did they report?

I’m not sure, she says.

None of them is sure and none of them seems to have knowledge that’s firsthand, concrete, conclusive.

I’m sorry, you guys, I say. This sucks.

It’s revolting, says one of the men who is most vocal. He is older than the others. This shit should not still be going on.

I don’t call Melissa. I worry that she’ll think I’m being unreasonable. I worry that I ask too much, and I don’t want to ask for more that she can’t give. Instead, I wait two days and then I call a dean I know and trust, who helped me briefly when I was pregnant my last year of grad school and navigating how to keep my health insurance while not being on campus as much. She comes each semester during one of the two fifteen-minute faculty meetings to repeat the same phrases about university policy.

You have a duty to report, she tells us each semester. If you are a witness to or have knowledge of any of the following, she says, and then she lists them, knowing full well half the room has tuned her out, all the student grievances that we must contact her about.

So provincial, a fifty-something man had whispered to me at one of these meetings a few months ago, as this dean explained that one could not date a student while she was in one’s class. This guy scrolled through Facebook on his phone and shook his head as she told us undergrads were always, regardless of the circumstances, off limits.

They’re not children, he added, and I sat still, my hands held in my lap.

First, I write this dean an email asking if she has time to meet with me. I tell her I have something I need help with. She gives me a couple of times that work for me to come in or talk on the phone. I skip out of work in the middle of the day to meet with her.

We make small talk. I make an off-handed joke about wanting to start a commune upstate because New York is too expensive, and she shows me a video on her phone of a plain-faced older woman with long, gray hair who built her own house and farm and what seems to be an anticapitalist self-help YouTube empire about the advantages of going off the grid.

So, what’s up? the dean asks after she turns off the third video; she turns her phone screen down on her desk. In this last video, the woman spent most of the time in conversation with her cows.

What’s going on? she says.

I’m tearing up but both of us ignore this.

I trust you, I say. I feel like I should say something, I say. But I have no firsthand knowledge; I have no evidence, no facts.

Okay, she says.

I start with the student in