Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

They became an item, which puts me in a difficult position, as you might imagine. It isn’t that I have another in mind for him, or that I believe he has made a poor choice. It’s just that — here’s the issue — each day when I walked in the classroom to teach, I had to pretend that I hadn’t just seen this Rachel Weisman walking from the shower in just a towel, her long hair wet, and her shoulders gleaming with little beads of water on them, and I had to pretend Rachel Weisman hadn’t spent the night within my walls, and that I hadn’t heard my son and Rachel Weisman making love, which I did, though I sometimes covered my head with two pillows nearly to the point of suffocation.

I am not stuffy or uptight about these matters. We are in America after all, and this sort of activity goes on. Remember, if you will, that I am in the position of grading her. There are no rules against this, but there probably should be. Our house is relatively small, which compounds the problem. At first she was like a ghost I caught only traces of but never directly encountered. But that began to change, and she became increasingly brazen. After two weeks of their sleepovers, I was reading in bed, which is one of my greatest pleasures, and I’d forgotten to close the door and when I looked up at the entryway, Rachel Weisman was standing there watching me. She had on one of Rajiv’s V-neck undershirts and a wraparound skirt worn low enough to expose the black waistband of her underwear, which I did not care to see. Her hair was tied back behind her head, her pale freckled arms folded before her.

“Good book?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“What is it?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.”

“It’s a biography. Of Lawrence.”

She seemed to be taking in this information and deciding something.

“I like Lawrence,” she said.

Her expressions were at once self-assured and desirous of affirmation. She had lived more than I knew, she seemed to be saying. I feared she was looking at my thinning hair, or the birthmark below my right eye that strangers often mistook for a terrible burn.

“Especially the stories,” she said.

“Well, good night then,” I said, and in my own house I gently closed my door.

When she saw me in the hallways at school, she would stop me to ask personal things such as, “Did you sleep okay, Mr. Singh?” Or “How’d you like the veggie calzone?”

Once, after class and within earshot of another student, she commented that the heat had stopped working halfway through the night, and she had nearly frozen in the too-thin quilt.

I took her aside. “Do you know how that sounds?” I asked. And she smiled, conspiratorially, as though we two were putting one over on everyone else. “I get it,” she said, but I only felt worse.

A few nights later I told Rajiv that I didn’t mind them dating, though I did, but that I’d prefer it if she didn’t sleep over. “As if, ” he said. “It’s my house too.”

My son had begun in the last year to wear modish sideburns, as well as a cluster of beads along a leather strap tied around his neck, like an insouciant surfer, though we live more than two hundred miles from the nearest beach. His T-shirt had a picture of a chimpanzee with President Bush’s face.

“But I’m her teacher,” I said.

“So.”

“You don’t see anything strange about that?”

“Not really.”

It is at times like this that I wonder if it is possible to dislike your offspring, whether the rule about love holds for every father and son. Because I do not like his selfishness when it comes to me.

The fact that his mother and I have been separated for two years now has made me more pliable and then more resentful. It used to be that I set rules and enforced them. Here I’ve let him dictate matters, and so the matter of Rachel Weisman has been closed. She will sleep in our house and I will be uncomfortable.

The next thing that happened was that Rachel started missing classes. She’s very smart, but she’d miss a class and she’d make an excuse but where she’d been was at my house, in bed with my son.

I can’t say for sure they were in bed, but I’d bet good money on it. I would bet one of our cars on it, the six-year-old Volvo. I wondered what the other students thought, and what they knew.

After five missed classes, I told Rachel at dinner she was in danger of failing. And she said she would return, she’d been sick, and she had been working hard on her midterm paper.

“It’s really good,” my son said. “It’s one of the best papers I’ve ever read.”

“I won’t miss another class,” she said, but then she giggled, because my son must have pinched her under the table. She was dressed in a football shirt I’d passed down to Rajiv.

“If you miss many more, I’ll have no choice,” I said.

“I won’t miss one,” she said.

“Tough guy,” my son said, when Rachel carried their dishes into the kitchen.

Every once in a while we have these cowboy confrontations.

“Try me,” I said.

“I just might,” he said.

“What’s this about?” Rachel said as she walked back in the room.

Rajiv apologized to me later that night. He said he agreed it was unorthodox. He hadn’t planned on dating one of my students, but then I was the one who’d invited them all over. And he had been lonely before that. I told him that surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. Away from view, Rajiv could be introverted and remote, as I too had been at twenty-three, though he masks this publicly with his brash defiance.

There was a chance down the line he and Rachel Weisman might want to get an apartment together, he said, and “give this thing a try.”

I think he imagined that would comfort me, but it had the opposite effect. Now in class I was having trouble concentrating on anything other than Rachel Weisman. The other students must have picked this up. I rarely made eye contact with Rachel and hardly ever called on her even though she raised her hand more than anyone else. When she spoke I addressed my response to the class as a whole. In retrospect this was both unkind and stupid because it didn’t hide anything and rather made our relationship seem like something it wasn’t.

One day after class I saw her walk off into the woods behind school with another boy from my class. I became jealous on behalf of Rajiv.

The next class I asked both of them many questions to see if she’d done the reading. She had, but not carefully. I exposed the gaps in her knowledge, and each time I could see her growing angrier, and I thought my son would probably hear about this.

I chose not to care. But I did begin to feel as though I were in the middle of a complicated love affair, and indeed one night I dreamt that she was sleeping in my bed and that my son was teaching and that I was another student in my son’s class. I began to have other erotic dreams about Rachel Weisman, and I stopped calling on her altogether, or even acknowledging her existence. At home I mostly ignored her as well and this made her visibly upset. One day as I walked to my car I was aware of her watching me, following me, though I never turned to look. As I drove off I thought I heard someone say, “ Dick, ” though it might have been my imagination.

During these weeks I felt volatile in the manner of a hormonally ravaged adolescent. I became acutely aware of every action that occurred in my house, all the arrivals and departures, movie rentals, and book borrowing from my library, the extra garments in Rajiv’s closet and the hair and makeup items in the bathroom that made me unbearably nostalgic for the presence of a woman, the hushed and cheerless late-night phone conversations to a female voice in a distant time zone (805 area code), the in-room meals and showers and lovemaking, of which there was decidedly less these days. I wondered whether Rachel had a house key and so to test that fact I double bolted the pantry door — Rachel’s entryway of choice — one night when she was studying late at the library, then an hour later unbolted it to avoid seeming childish.