A Brief Love Affair

"The majority of men live lives of quiet desperation."
Henry David Thoreau

"Each moment of a happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life."

Aphra Behn

Sam Emanual Livitz, eleventh grade teacher, and twenty-four year old, pulled his ’98 Nissan Sentra into the driveway. Music from the seventies blared out from the speakers, but as he turned off the key, the noise—first the gush of air, and then the languished wail of the guitar—came to a startling and accentuated halt. A conversation he had that day with the principle of his high school poked at him like a band of impish fiends.

Why don’t you date someone your own age? Or at least someone that has been through college?

Sam clicked the seatbelt lock and grabbed the handle of his briefcase all in one motion, and in the next, he was outside the car. He contemplated walking down the driveway to check the mail, but decided that whatever might be in there would also be there in a few hours when he took out the trash, and he might as well conserve his footsteps. More dead leaves had fallen during the day, and although the landlord had been busy the previous day raking in the front yard, new leaves littered the overgrown lawn.

And did you ever stop to consider what you could do to this girl’s life? I know how these young girls get attached—hell, my own daughter married the first guy she fell in love with.

The principle had threatened suspension, without pay, which was a light offense compared to what the school board could do. Any relations with a student, if prosecuted, carried the charge of a class II felony, two to twenty years in prison, and a $10,000 fine. It didn’t matter if the family or even the school did or didn’t press charges, social services would foot the bill.
Inside the apartment light filtered through a small box window at the top of one of the walls. Dust motes floated. He had left last night’s dishes in the sink, and the kitchen smelled of soy sauce. Julia, Julia, Julia. He said her name to his quiet apartment and the walls didn’t answer. He wanted a vision. He sat down at his computer, waited for the out-of-date desktop--the clunky apparatus that sat on his desk like something ancient and immovable—to boot up, and then he wrote her a message:

Julia, I care about you more than I can express right now, but I think it’s time for us to put things on hold. But as I type those words I cannot feel anything but grief. For when will the next time be that I kiss your lips, run my hand up across your stomach, and see you dance the chacha in your underwear. =P My career is in jeapordy. And although I wish I could tell Abrams and the whole staff to go fuck themselves, I would be throwing it all away. You are young, and will find love again.

He realized the truth of this last statement. He wasn’t even her first, and probably by the end of the Summer, if he cut things off, she would find someone else, or, like someone far smarter than him, focus her attention on her own life and career aspirations.

The principle had gone easy on him, but part of him wishes that he hadn’t. Part of him wished he’d have fired him on the spot. Surely the courts would not be that severe on a man who had no previous infractions, particularly of this kind. Sam didn’t know what he wanted to say, or what needed to be done, so he closed the web browser, deleting what he had written.

The principle had discovered his love affair. He probably overheard rumors, investigated things. One of her friends, maybe, had let the information out to another teacher, or a parent. As much as his curiosity compelled him to find the answer, to find some way of stopping the rumors where they lingered, he knew that it didn’t matter. Once a word escapes, it spreads from mouth to ear, and on and on, better than any reporting service could hope to mimic, if the story was juicy enough. He had never imagined the possible penalty. Class II felony. It was bogus.

When he lay in bed that night, yellow hum of a dehumidifier doing its best to lull him to sleep, he imagined what he could say to a judge, to a court room full of school board mothers, women like Patti O’Brian—not lesbians but the way they always wore the school sweatshirts, and their cropped hair, both said otherwise. He had read Lolita. He knew that in colonial America, the age of consent for a girl was twelve years old. Twelve. And she was eighteen. If anything, recent media propose the idea that children mature faster than they previously had. Physically at least.

Imprints of something gilded and resolute passed before his vision, and his head sunk deeper into the pillow, he pictured Judge Judy and her gavel, and those thick glasses, and laughed. He knew that if he had a woman judge, he could very well spend a long time in jail. Ten years in some kind of penitentiary and he would have to put off retirement. Move down south, where he could still work. Schools would still hire him, because at that age they would understand that what ailed him (by this time what had been desire, lust, and love, would be termed an ailment) would be long gone from his system, due primarily to age. He stopped. He did a breathing exercise. Counting in for five seconds. Out for five seconds. And then he fell asleep.

** How it started **

A week before classes, to welcome the new school year, Sam met with four teachers for happy hour, as they had weekly throughout the second half of the school year. Keith had arranged the event. “It will help us get into the swing of things,” he said. Sam had no plans, and looked forward to the get-togethers that had ceased when school closed. He left his apartment and showed up ten minutes early. He ordered a Blue Point toasted lager, as was the custom of the group, a basket of pretzels, and waited at the empty bar. When Keith arrived, he ordered a beer and the two discussed their summers. Keith spent his in Amagansett, where his family owned a house. His dark Italian skin had been burned several shades deeper from a daily regimen of surfing and beach lounging. “Next summer, I’ll invite you,” he said. “Come out for a weekend, maybe a week. The girls, man, all they want to do is party.” Although Keith pretended not to remember, Sam had been offered the same visit several months before summer recess began, although besides the one offer, he had never heard another word about it.

“That would be a lot of fun,” Sam said. He had lived on Long Island his entire life, but had rarely left Nassau county. He knew next to nothing about the Hamptons, of Montaulk, Sag’s Harbor, Fire Island. He had read the Great Gatsby and, when he had first gotten a license, had driven around Centerport and Oyster bay, walked along the beaches and seen the mansions posted like freshly carved watch-towers, ancient in function yet molded in new age polymers and suspended on precariously angled stilts. When he had pulled his car into a gated community to turn around, a cop followed him and set off his sirens. Sam’s 1983 Volvo looked suspicious, compared to the Lexus’s, Bentleys and Jaguars that most of the residents owned. After that, he never had the desire to return without an invitation.

“That would be nice,” he said again.

“How was your Summer?” Keith asked.

“Oh, you know. I was stuck here in town. I moved though, finally got my own place. Right down in the village, up on Gardner’s East. It’s real nice. About a five minute walk out of the village. It’s real nice. You should come check it out some time. I’ve been meaning to have a house warming party. Or something. Something small. Maybe next weekend.”

When Sam finished talking, he wasn’t sure if Keith had been listening, but then Keith lifted his head like a kid in class who was on the verge of falling asleep, roused by the silence of the bar.

“I can’t go out in the village anymore,” he said. “I see students out, and I’m like, ‘aren’t you like nineteen years old?’ And they are, and it feels weird for some reason. I know I’m only twenty-three, but, I don’t know.”

“They’re hot though. Aren’t they? The girls.”

“Look at you, little Sammy.” Keith laughed two perverted and approving grunts.

“Would you ever ask out a student?” Sam asked.

“Hell yes, I would. But I looked into it and you can get like twenty years in prison, even if they’re over eighteen. How fucked up is that? You know in colonial times the age of consent was twelve years old? My little sister, at sixteen, could be the mother of four.”
Sam sat in his car in the teacher’s parking lot, between the oval running track, redone last spring, and the North end cafeteria. Even after two years, the first day always made Sam nervous. Thirty-three new faces, bright eyes bent forward in their desks, and eager; or those disinterested learners, set in low-brimmed caps, hooded sweatshirts, with pothead eyes cast downward, and a lazy pen doodling across a piece of paper, or their desktop. He learned not to show up on time, but to enter five minutes late, so that when he closes the door, all eyes, even the blushed ones in the back, immediately rose to him.

When he entered the room the students quieted. He took his time, made a slow and deliberate swoop when he closed the door, and similarly when he set his tired looking briefcase on the desk and removed the roster. Before saying a word, he wrote his name on the blackboard in an uneven print that sagged a good four inches at the end.

“Good day, and welcome to a new year, students,” he said. He tried to stay formal, at least at first, and often, on those first introductions, found himself mimicking a southern professor of literature he had during school, who addressed his students with the cadence of a mint julep sipping gentleman. Sam’s voice carried through the room, but his small size and the dirt-brown sweat stains at his wrists detracted from his presence.

During his introduction of the course, most of the students’ had retracted from their previously astute positions, and now sagged back into their chairs. “I will begin with the roll call. Please say ‘here’ when I say your name.”

When he spoke her name, Julia Davis, he didn’t linger on the softness of it. Nor did he lift his eyes to see her tiny hand prod the air to accompany the frail voice that stated “here.”

Julia watched him completely as he spoke at length about what he hoped to accomplish that semester, and that year. He grew bolder at her attention, first leaning back on the edge of the desk, and then pacing the front of the room in a slow and methodical stroll. As he spoke he swept his eyes to one or two other students, and then stop to look briefly out across the tennis courts, before returning to match her gaze. She fluttered her eyes incessantly, these clear blue things that seemed utterly nervous and yet enamored at the same time. In the silence when he handed out the syllabi, and the course texts, he had fantasized about her lingering behind after class, and what he might say to her.
He had often developed crushes on his students, female mostly, but occasionally a male piqued his interest in a way that wasn’t quite sexual but wasn’t altogether fraternal. He mostly liked the quiet girls who dressed conservatively, and didn’t seem to have to wake an hour and a half before class, brushing on make-up and pilfering their closets for the right ensemble of clothing.

Sometimes he spotted her in the mornings, after he had parked his car, her pink backpack and brown hair untended to, the strands that had escaped from their tie flittering around her tiny ears. Sometimes as he spoke in front of a class, he would see someone passing the small window by the doorway, and when he turned, on occasion, he would catch the tail end of that same backpack.

During class she spoke to no one, and when she was called on to produce an answer, she spoke in a soft, uncertain voice, as if she had not been accustomed to projection, perhaps even living in a home where any noise above a whisper was considered rude and unnecessary. Despite her quiet tendencies she proved herself rather brilliant, both in her in-class curt responses to any questions posed, but also on the weekly quizzes, where in two weeks she had only lost one mark, to a question that Sam ultimately pegged as misleading and unspecific.

As days passed, more and more he found himself day dreaming about this young girl, and a possible future together. Although he hadn’t breached the student-teacher boundary, on one day he had come very close to asking the young girl out to dinner. In general, she was apt to be the first to leave the classroom, or close to it, but on one day she had dallied a moment longer, composing a final note to herself in her daily planner, and as she rose to leave, the rest of the class already empty, he smiled at her. She hadn’t noticed, at first, but did as she passed his desk, and he caught a tint of blush in her cheeks.

“Julia,” he said. She seemed startled at his outright use of her name, unsure if he was actually referring to her. “Yes, you.” She smiled at this, and he thought she even laughed, although the quiet hiss of her throat may have been a slight cough. He didn’t know what he intended to do, and by this point the possibility of asking her to see him outside of class seemed mostly preposterous, so he simply said, “Good work on your quizzes. You are rather bright, you know?”

“Thank you,” she answered as if someone had passed her a plate of the touted ribums in the cafeteria.

“That is all. Carry on. I will see you tomorrow then. Wait.” He said, as she was in the doorway. “I have study hall during fourth period. Why don’t you stop by sometime and we can talk about things?”

“Oh. Okay.” She said.

Sam doubted that his offer would be met with anything but that very day she showed up. At first he talked to her about what she hoped to accomplish with her academic studies. He told her that with her grades she could probably get into any Ivy League institution that she could dream of. She was a writer for the school newspaper, and even played the clarinet in band—had played in the All State band in both her sophomore and Junior years.

The relationship began with her kissing his cheek after all of the students had left the study hall, and had progressed from there. She had continued to open up to him through the weeks, and turned out to be rather flamboyant, loud and lewd if a certain level of comfort was supplied.

**

When the day ended, he walked out the front entrance to where he had parked next to Denise Rafferty’s monster of an SUV, and got into his car. The day had been perfect, weather-wise, and was all that most people talked about, an unusually warm sun for mid-October. Now, at night, clouds to the west had seemingly layered themselves in the sky, matted and thick, and blocked any chance of a sunset. He called her, his hand taping the middle console during the rings. He watched students pass by, walking through the parking lot, where their parents waited, blocking traffic until their child was safe and seat-belted in. And then she answered.

“I’m sick,” she said. “Or that’s what I told my Mom. I’m relaxing. I watched seven episodes of Gray’s Anatomy today.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. “What are you wearing?” He had heard that he would lose his sexual appetite with age, but that didn’t seem to be true.

“Easy there, beaver.” Somehow he had come to be known as beaver, based on the appearance of a rather hairy pubic region. It slightly bothered him. “My Mom’s gone for the next two hours. Come over. I’ll show you my fish tank.”

Besides wanting madly to see Julia naked, he had also expressed interest in a fifty-five gallon salt water aquarium which she presided over. “Okay. I will see you in about ten minutes.”

Julia lived past one of the elementary schools in the district, known for the best test scores, and the richest residents. The lawns sprawled, and sank back into the woods, from the top of the hills, where most of the houses sat, large but at least forty-years old, so dignified and warm, in that none had vinyl siding. Julia’s own was a ranch model, set back a couple of hundred feet from the street, where Sam parked, even though the drive was empty. If she had arrived home, parking on the street would arise less suspicions. He could act more like her teacher, respectful of someone else’s home and their habits, less likely to be fondling their teenage daughter with her bedroom door cracked open an inch just in case the front door swung open.

They had sex, as was their habit, each quick to arouse, and then to finish, panting and sweaty. They lay in bed, slightly squashed together in her single mattress. After some awkward exasperated sighs, they repositioned themselves so that her head lay on his chest. He felt clumsy and awkward like that, the weight of her head somehow dampening his chest’s ability to rise and then fall.

“Your heartbeat sounds like a maniac hitting a kettle drum,” she said. “But it has good rhythm, at least. How was your day?”

“Good.” He said. But that was all he could say. He didn’t want to tell her, not yet. Later he could tell her, at some point. Her mother kept things clean, ran a tight shift. In the foyer, pictures of the family decorated the walls, and an antique lamp and stand added a warm yet somewhat pretentious feel which carried through to the rest of the house.

He doesn’t know exactly how it happened, but he had been sitting in a park one day—he had intended to read a book—but he just sat there, eating half of a bagel, and watching two squirrels chase each other around the tree. They didn’t pursue with mild interest, but with a ravenous intensity that humans hardly attain. It was animal instinct, one squirrel protecting its territory from another, securing the supply lines, something you only see humans doing on a grand scale. And then a man besides him began to chant. He was too far away to hear completely, but the chants were a low hum, and as the man chanted he ran a series of beads through his fingers. And Sam thought of the men who spend their entire lives in a monastery, chanting and hitting gongs, how maybe that didn’t sound all too bad at some points. Something snapped in him, an awakening in his mind, and in his head, that wanted to talk with the old chanting man, and with everyone in the park. But the feeling never lasted, it fell down somewhere inside of him, maybe to be woken another day. He walked back to his car, had a hard time even looking any passerby’s in the eye, and when he made it to his car, he turned the ignition, drove home, and still had no idea what to do. He would let the world decide, and fate, and men’s rule’s, and a schoolboard, and whatever happened would happen.