I spent most of the next two months lying in and on my trundle bed, across from my tennis trophies and Teddy bears, waiting to return to college and feeling like an unmitigated failure. “Moods sit on me like lead X-ray bibs,” I wrote, my diary having become the one place where I felt free to express my humiliation.
In Ithaca a few weeks later, snow drifts flanking the streets, J and I noticed a photograph of X in a campus newspaper and decided that he was cute. J, in jest, suggested that I do something about it. We giggled at the very idea. Intrigued, I looked up his class in the course catalogue. Although the subject didn’t particularly interest me, I registered for it the next day.
It is odd to think how easily we might never have met the people who leave an indelible mark on us.
One evening, halfway into the semester, X invited me over for a “nightcap” at his rental house, a mile from campus, and then, in the most casual of tones, asked me if I’d like to spend the actual night. My naïveté matched only by my recklessness, I agreed. Given X’s position and résumé, I don’t think it even occurred to me that he might have anything other than my best interests at heart. He’d already mentioned that his marriage was in its death throes. I assumed that he and his wife had some kind of understanding. But, really, what did I know about such things? To the extent that I was apprehensive, it was because I wasn’t sure whether I’d measure up.
But, before long, any concern on my part was lost to the surreal amazement of finding myself in X’s embrace. That someone of what I perceived as his exalted stature wanted me as his lover—and, what’s more, was prepared to risk so much for the pleasure of such—both astonished me and seemed to validate my mother’s insistence on my exceptionality. For the first time ever, I felt on par with my hyper-accomplished sisters, with whom I was always trying and—it seemed to me—failing to keep up. Plus, to have won the affections of someone who had published books and articles, who was invited to give lectures all over the country, and had travelled all over the world (and had a foreign accent, as if to prove the point) made me feel brilliant and worldly by association—all while promising to erase the last traces of my sheltered suburban upbringing. Or maybe the truth was that I was so busy worrying about whether I looked O.K. that I was hardly thinking at all.
All I know for sure is that, afterward, it seemed as if nothing so exciting had ever happened to me. There is a month-long lacuna in my diary that matches up with the first month of my affair. The next entry after that begins, simply, “WOW.”
In the nineteen-seventies, Cornell—along with Yale and Johns Hopkins—became a locus of the literary and philosophical movement, imported from Paris, known as post-structuralism. Positing reality as less a fixed thing than a product of the language that described or “constructed” it—“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” Jacques Derrida famously wrote, sometimes translated as “there is nothing outside the text”—the teachings it encompassed were sometimes known simply as “theory.” On my return from Spain, I’d switched majors from Spanish to comparative literature and discovered that I could take various “theory-oriented” classes that would count toward my degree, including some in what was then known as women’s studies.
In one, I was introduced to the work of the feminist deconstructionist Judith Butler. From Butler’s just-published book, “Gender Trouble,” I absorbed the compelling idea that women were always playing a part. Butler wrote—and I dutifully underlined—“As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an ‘act,’ as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of ‘the natural’ that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status.” Butler’s theory of gender confirmed the feeling, long embedded in my psyche, that I had to perform in order for others to like me—and, especially, to perform my femininity.
It was in my women’s-studies classes, too, that I was first exposed to a corresponding movement that came to be known as sex-positive feminism. Mirroring the Reagan era’s “me-first” ethos, it eschewed economic issues and those related to male violence in favor of a politics of personal fulfillment centered on the concept of female pleasure. (In my “French Feminisms” class, the preferred term for such was jouissance.) The rough idea was that women should be celebrated not just as desirable objects but as desiring subjects, and that, in liberating their libido and seizing the terms of their objectification, they might liberate themselves, too. It followed that even entanglements that appeared to present asymmetries of power could be justified on the ground that the participants were acting out a fantasy or engaging in role-play. Conversely, the inherently emotional aspect of sex, along with its ability to make one human feel bound to another, went unmentioned. So did the fact that, in heterosexual relations, biology rendered the female party the more physically vulnerable one.
It was thanks to this line of thinking—a line I later came to regard as casuistry—that I was able both to justify my affair and to identify myself as a feminist while conducting my personal life in a way that might suggest otherwise. That X considered himself a “male feminist” and appeared to harbor few ethical qualms about what we were doing seemed to be further evidence that nothing about our situation could possibly be wrong. And, besides, wasn’t morality “socially constructed,” too?
But, if my involvement with X began as a lark, an act of one-upmanship, even a feminist statement, it soon became something else entirely—at least to me. After a long winter, Ithaca’s gray skies and cold rains finally gave way to scintillating sun, and my own mood followed suit. By the second month, I was in a quasi-fugue state.
At first, my friends reacted to the news more with amusement and curiosity than with censure. Age-gap relationships were common in that era; women of eighteen and older were seen as full-fledged adults, and universities had few prohibitions against student-faculty dating. Though I perceived that X’s being married did raise eyebrows.
The only person I recall expressing any hesitation was P, a kind, hippie-ish friend from my semester-abroad program, in whom I’d confided. “Is this really what you want?” she wrote to me. “Or are you being dragged along by this powerful drowning wave? Your initiative or his? [And] how do you always get into these relationships with such a dominating figure? . . . Remember, you are in total control of yourself!”
But, while I appreciated P’s concern, I had no answer to allay it, if only because being subsumed by a “powerful drowning wave” was, in truth, precisely what I was hoping for. Where once I’d lived in fear of losing control—as a child, I’d been particularly frightened of carnival rides and deep water—now all I secretly wanted was to close my eyes and let someone else take charge. Also, to the extent that X seemed as besotted with me as I was with him—within forty-eight hours, he’d said that he missed me when we were apart—I could believe that the “initiative” belonged to us both. But, really, I wasn’t thinking about such things. I’d never before felt so desired and admired. For the moment, at least, and to my enormous relief, my eating disorder had vanished—and my appetite along with it. I’d regained my confidence, as well. Waking at X’s place, I felt as if, after having spent years at the “kids’ table,” I’d finally been invited to join the adult one, where wine and witty conversation flowed freely.
I soon concluded that I’d fallen in love—but also that we’d fallen in love.
Simultaneously, I rejoiced that X seemed to misread me, if self-servingly, as a happy-go-lucky, young sophisticate. Although I was never wholly comfortable in his presence, I did my best to embody his misreading. “Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are,” Alain de Botton writes in “On Love.”
Most of the untruths that passed between X and me were lies of omission. When my inauthenticity seemed at risk of exposure, however, I’d actively fib. I recall him asking me once if I’d ever been in “one of those sororities” and me quickly denying that I would ever have belonged to something so juvenile or politically regressive, when, in fact, I’d lived at my sorority house, albeit unhappily, for part of sophomore year.
But, to the extent that my life had become a Russian nesting doll of secrets and evasions, one encompassing the other, the entire contraption seemed at perpetual risk of coming apart, which only added to my anxiety. X kept me hidden from his friends and colleagues, and he expected me to be quiet about our involvement, too, both to preserve his own privacy and to protect his wife’s feelings. (In response to my urging him to come clean, he would say that she was not the one who had done anything wrong.) Although I’d accepted his refusal to conduct our relationship openly, I defied him by telling every friend I had, as proud of our connection as X was concerned about it becoming public knowledge, even as I feared X would find out and be furious at me.
Outside the classroom, we were two people of disparate ages delighting in each other’s company—laughing, gossiping, and bantering. When not watching trashy TV or “feminist porn,” we’d go on drives up the lake. But the power imbalance between us was never not present. When I least expected it, he’d turn stern and reprimand me—one time, for being insufficiently deferential to the waitress at the diner where we sat eating our breakfast and, by association, to the “working classes.” On occasions such as these, I’d fall silent, rather than defend myself, inclined to believe that he knew better than I did.
There was rarely any intellectual exchange between us, beyond X imparting his dark and paranoid view of the world, and me listening and offering the occasional question or quip. Sometimes, a little voice inside me would ask, Really?, with regard to some tendentious assertion he’d presented as the indubitable truth. But I mostly kept my doubts to myself.
I also remember sitting alongside X in his living room, as he read my classwork. “This was a great paper,” he wrote on the last page, before handing it back to me. “Too short, of course, to fully explore what you mean by the ‘mentality of suburban life.’ ” If I found this setup problematic in any way, I have no memory of it.
Even thornier was how the same dynamic played out in intimate spaces.
As the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the nineteen-eighties, some left-wing intellectuals began to extoll individual acts of cultural subversion as substitutes for revolution. In my classes at Cornell, the word “subversive” was bandied about so often that I came to think of it as a synonym for “good.” The AIDS crisis and the heartless response to it from the Christian right, then America’s chief proponent of “family values,” further buttressed the belief, seemingly shared by X, that libertinism was not just compatible with feminism but an ideal worth championing. In one of my women’s-studies classes, we were even reading a novel—“Justine”—by the Marquis de Sade.
But if X believed that, in transgressing with his student slash research assistant, he was sticking it to the man, he did so without seeming to realize that he was The Man—or, at least, he was for me. As reluctant to disappoint him as I was determined to prove my mettle, I’d effectively surrendered all agency. I don’t know if I was even able to differentiate between his pleasure and mine, or mine and its opposite; they were all jumbled together in my head. Whatever X wanted, I reflexively wanted, too. At any point, of course, I could have said no. I was not under threat of punishment.
But I never said no. I longed for any and all manifestations of X’s affection. I was also scared of losing him.
More generally, the sexual revolution had made asserting boundaries the business of prudes. Wary of being saddled with such a damning label, young women like me were therefore disinclined to have any boundaries whatsoever.
Which was all to the benefit of those who felt entitled to violate them.
I was scared of losing X, but I could not see that I was already in the process of doing so. One day, as we climbed the shaded banks of one of Ithaca’s scenic falls, he told me that our relationship was “ill-fated.” I looked up the meaning of the word when I got back to my room.
Yet even when I was faced with an official definition—“destined for misfortune; doomed”—I did not absorb its implication for my own life. Instead, I recall noting that one of the synonyms given was “star-crossed,” a word I associated positively with “Romeo and Juliet” and, by extension, great passion.
Or, maybe, there was a part of me that liked the idea of being involved in something impossible and fraught. (At least it wasn’t boring, like New Jersey.) And wasn’t true love almost by definition tragic?
Or am I lying to myself? Like X, maybe I’d organized my personal life, however unconsciously, in such a way as to avoid any chance of actual intimacy. From a certain angle, conducting a “fantasy relationship” was far safer than conducting a real one.
But, of course, it wasn’t safe at all.
At the end of the spring semester, X invited me to spend the weekend at his wife’s house, in the city where she taught, while she was out of town. Once again, it did not occur to me to object. Nor, in my immaturity, could I conceive of X’s wife as another fully sentient human who, in all likelihood, would not want me in her home. My only objection was that I couldn’t afford to go; he sent me a plane ticket. (X told The New Yorker that he remembers several incidents described in this piece differently.)
I no longer recall the interiors of the different houses and apartments where X and I met up that year. What I do remember are the shampoos in the bathrooms: Aussie at his place, some kind of henna rinse at hers. In their perceived exoticness, as much as in their implied intimacy, the sight and smell of one or another plastic bottle would leave me briefly startled by my own misbegotten proximity, if not startled enough to dislodge the delusions that had taken up residence in my head.
Halfway through that summer, which I spent mostly in Ithaca, where our visits continued, I told X, for the first time, that I loved him. I had never said those words to a non-family member before. Having concluded my teens without understanding that desire, especially as it’s experienced by some men, only sometimes overlaps with deeper emotions, I assumed he’d reciprocate.
That he did not actually love me was not an idea I had entertained—until he failed to echo my declaration, claiming that, although he was flattered by my pronouncement, were he to do so, it would imply a commitment that he couldn’t make. Nevertheless, he did not express any misgivings about continuing our affair.
At first, I tried to rationalize X’s response. I appreciated that he’d been honest. It was true that he was in no position to commit to a romantic partner right now. And, in the end, weren’t they just words—which, as I’d learned in my theory classes, had no intrinsic meaning and referred only to other words?
But, over time, X’s withholding of the words I’d wanted to hear began to eat away at me like a parasite, summoning back the feelings of inadequacy and alienation for which our affair, at least initially, had been the ultimate balm. It was no longer enough for me simply to be desired. I wanted to be loved, too—and could come up with no answer as to why I was not by X, except that I wasn’t good enough to be so.
I conjectured that he kept me a secret for similar reasons. “How can I not help but think that I am unacceptable, embarrassing . . . when he won’t tell any of his friends about me—needless to say, his wife” I wrote in my diary. In growing frustration, one day I dashed off a letter to X, calling him a “piece of shit” and telling him that our affair was over. But, soon after, I must have told him that I hadn’t meant what I’d said. The next time I saw him, I recall him telling me that my letter had been “extremely hurtful” to him. Then I felt guilty and embarrassed and found myself apologizing for mistreating him.
It wasn’t just that I had placed X on an impossibly high pedestal in my mind; I’d made his feelings for me the measure of my self-worth. Rather than walking away, therefore, I was inclined to dig in. “I want him to take responsibility for the double life he’s been leading,” I wrote.
Of course, he did no such thing. Nor did I actually insist on it.
At the beginning of the fall semester, I developed a kidney infection, the result of an untreated U.T.I. and, more generally, of my failure to notice or take care of my health. I was in the hospital for six days. My parents drove four hours each way to come and see me, but, to my recollection, stayed only twenty minutes; my mother found hospitals too upsetting.
X, who had by then left Ithaca and reassumed his regular post, didn’t visit at all. But a bouquet soon arrived from him, accompanied by a card that alluded to “our song” and was signed, “Love [X].” I was surprised, touched, and even hopeful. Never mind that “our song,” a cover version of the 1983 R. & B. hit “Just Be Good to Me”—which X had, of course, picked out himself, then recorded for me on a cassette tape—was about a young woman who was so enamored of the man in her life that she didn’t mind sharing him with unnamed others. I remember endlessly rewinding the tape on my mini boombox, parsing the lyrics in search of evidence that, one day, just as the song went, We could be together, be together.
Once recovered, I began spending weekends with X in New York City, where he now lived—always, of course, at his convenience and in accordance with the dictates of his schedule. Even if he wouldn’t publicly acknowledge me or say that he loved me, I still felt special and excited to be in his company. Flea-market shopping in Chelsea with my secret, inappropriate, older “boyfriend,” or sitting across from him in a dimly lit SoHo bistro, or browsing the aisles of the St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village—I could almost imagine myself into one of the contemporary novels and short-story collections I read on school breaks, like Tama Janowitz’s “Slaves of New York,” Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” or Mary Gaitskill’s “Bad Behavior,” at least insofar as those books were about underemployed hipsters in downtown Manhattan, making chic messes out of their dysfunctional lives. To do so made me feel finally grown-up. Yet the feeling was constantly being thwarted by my fear that I couldn’t actually keep up with X—that I hadn’t read the “right” books or heard of the “right” people or had the “right” life experiences. It was another old anxiety, no doubt tracing back to my sisters.