Celeste Ng - Everything I Never Told You

By the time she had taken the top copy and passed the rest on, Professor Lee had begun to speak again.

“The image of the cowboy,” he said, “has existed longer than we might imagine.” There was no trace of an accent in his voice, and she slowly let out her breath. Where had he come from, she wondered. He sounded nothing like what she’d been told Chinamen sounded like: so solly, no washee. Had he grown up in America? Ten minutes in, the room began to rustle and murmur. Marilyn glanced at the notes she’d jotted down: phrases like “undergone multiple evolutions in each era of American history” and “apparent dichotomy between social rebel and embodiment of quintessential American values.” She scanned the syllabus. Ten required books, a midterm exam, three essays. This wasn’t what her classmates had had in mind. A girl at the side of the room tucked her book beneath her arm and slipped out the door. Two girls from the next row followed. After that it was a slow but steady trickle. Every minute or two another few students left. One boy from the first row stood up and cut right in front of the podium on his way out. The last to leave were three boys from the back. They whispered and sniggered as they edged past just-emptied seats, their thighs bumping each armrest with a soft thump, thump, thump. As the door closed behind them, Marilyn heard one shout “Yippee-ki-yay-ay!” so loud that he drowned out the lecture. Only nine other students still remained, all studiously bent over notebooks, but they were all reddening in the cheeks and at the edges of their ears. Her own face was hot and she didn’t dare look at Professor Lee. Instead she turned her face to her notes and put her hand to her forehead, as if shielding her eyes from the sun.

When she finally peeked up at the podium again, Professor Lee gazed out over the room as if nothing were amiss. He didn’t seem to notice that his voice now echoed in the nearly empty hall. He finished his lecture with five minutes remaining in the period and said, “I’ll hold office hours until three o’clock.” For just a few seconds, he stared straight ahead, toward a distant horizon, and she squirmed in her seat as if he were staring directly at her.

It was that last moment, the tingle at the back of her neck as he stacked his notes and left the room, that brought her to his office after the lecture. The history department had the peaceful quiet of a library, the air still and cool and slightly dusty. She found him at his desk, head propped against the wall, reading that morning’s Crimson . The part in his hair had blurred, and the cowlick stuck up again.

“Professor Lee? I’m Marilyn Walker. I was in your lecture just now?” Though she hadn’t meant it to, the end of her voice swerved up into a question, and she thought, I must sound like a teenage girl, a stupid, silly, shallow teenage girl.

“Yes?” He did not look up, and Marilyn fiddled with the top button of her sweater.

“I just wanted to check,” she said, “if you thought I’d be able to keep up with the work.”

He still didn’t look up. “Are you a history major?”

“No. Physics.”

“A senior?”

“No. A junior. I’m going to medical school. So history — it’s not my field.”

“Well,” he said, “to be honest, I don’t think you’ll have any problems. If you choose to stay in the course, that is.” He half-folded the newspaper, revealing a mug of coffee, took a sip, then fanned out the paper again. Marilyn pursed her lips. She understood that her audience was now over, that she was expected to turn around and walk back into the hallway and leave him alone. Still, she’d come here for something, though she wasn’t sure what, and she jutted out her jaw and pulled a chair up to his desk.

“Was history your favorite subject in school?”

“Miss Walker,” he said, looking up at last, “why are you here?” When she saw his face up close, just a table-width away, she saw again how young he was. Maybe only a few years older than she was, not even thirty, she thought. His hands were broad, the fingers long. No rings.

“I just wanted to apologize for those boys,” she said suddenly, and realized this was really why she’d come. He paused, eyebrows slightly raised, and she heard what he’d just heard: “boys,” a trivializing word. Boys will be boys.

“Friends of yours?”

“No,” Marilyn said, stung. “No. Just idiots.”

At that he laughed, and she did, too. She watched tiny crinkles form around the corners of his eyes, and when they unfolded, his face was different, softer, a real person’s face now. From here, she saw that his eyes were brown, not black, as they’d seemed in the lecture hall. How skinny he was, she thought, how wide his shoulders were, like a swimmer’s, his skin the color of tea, of fall leaves toasted by the sun. She had never seen anyone like him.

“I guess that sort of thing must happen all the time,” she said softly.

“I wouldn’t know. That was my first lecture. The department let me take this class as a trial.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “You stayed until the end.” They both looked down — he at his now-empty mug, she at the typewriter and neat sheaf of carbon paper perched at the end of his desk.

“Paleontology,” he said after a moment.

“What?”

“Paleontology,” he repeated. “My favorite subject. It was paleontology. I wanted to dig up fossils.”

“That’s a kind of history, though,” she said.

“I guess it is.” He grinned into his coffee cup, and Marilyn leaned across the desk and kissed him.

On Thursday, at the next lecture, Marilyn sat off to the side. When Professor Lee came into the room, she didn’t look up. Instead she wrote the date carefully in the corner of her notes, looping a demure S in September, crossing the t in a perfectly horizontal line. As he began to speak, her cheeks went hot, as if she’d stepped into summer sun. She was positive she was bright red, blazing like a lighthouse, but when she finally looked around, out of the corners of her eyes, everyone was focused on the lecture. There were a handful of other students in the room, but they were scribbling in their notebooks or facing the podium up front. No one noticed her at all.

When she’d kissed him, she had surprised herself. It had been such an impulse — the way she sometimes reached out to catch a stray leaf on the wind, or jumped a puddle on a rainy day — something done without thinking or resisting, something pointless and harmless. She had never done anything like that before and never would again, and looking back on it, she would forever be surprised at herself, and a little shocked. But at that moment she had known, with a certainty she would never feel about anything else in her life, that it was right, that she wanted this man in her life. Something inside her said, He understands. What it’s like to be different.

The touch of his lips on hers had startled her. He had tasted like coffee, warm and slightly bitter, and he had kissed back. That had startled her, too. As if he were ready for it, as if it were as much his idea as hers. After they finally drew apart, she’d been too embarrassed to meet his eyes. Instead she looked down into her lap, studying the soft plaid flannel of her skirt. Sweat bunched her slip to her thighs. In a moment she grew braver and peeked at him through the curtain of her hair. He looked shyly up at her then, through his lashes, and she saw that he wasn’t angry, that his cheeks were pink. “Perhaps we’d better go somewhere else,” he said, and she’d nodded and picked up her bag.

They’d walked down along the river, passing the redbrick dorms in silence. The crew team had been practicing, the oarsmen bending and unbending over their oars in perfect unison, the boat sliding across the water without sound. Marilyn knew these men: they asked her to mixers, to movies, to football games; they all looked alike, the same blend of sandy hair and ruddy skin she’d seen all through high school, all her life — as familiar as boiled potatoes. When she turned them down to finish a paper or catch up on her reading, they moved on to woo other girls down the hall. From where she stood on the riverbank, the distance made them anonymous, expressionless as dolls. Then she and James — as she did not even dare, yet, to think of him — had reached the footbridge, and she stopped and turned to face him. He hadn’t looked like a professor, but like a teenage boy, bashful and eager, reaching out to take her hand.