Douglas Kennedy - Woman in the Fifth

‘So it was a coup de foudre ?’

‘Not exactly — especially as all American colleges have insanely strict rules these days not just against student/ professor relationships, but even doing something mild and innocent like having a meal with a student of the opposite sex. At Crewe, we were even sent directives by some faculty committee on “sexual ethics”, informing us that, if we had a student in our office, we had to keep the door open and that we should always maintain at least three feet of physical distance between ourselves and them.’

‘No wonder America is insane.’

‘Anyway, after that first lecture, Shelley and I had coffee in the cafe on campus — and I have to say that there was this absolute instant rapport between us. She might have been nearly thirty years my junior — but within a few meetings it was clear to me that her world view was so considerably more mature than her age.’

‘Isn’t that always the cliche with the significantly younger woman? Yes, she might just have stopped playing with Barbie dolls, but her insights into Dostoevsky are extraordinary.’

‘OK, I do realize I was acting out certain Humbert Humbert fantasies—’

‘But Lolita was only in her early teens.’

‘Still, we had to be fantastically careful. So we started meeting at a coffee shop downtown. When the woman who ran the place noticed we’d been there around three times too often, we arranged that I would pick her up on a backstreet far from the college and then we’d drive to a small shitty city named Toledo—’

‘Like Toledo in Spain?’

‘Like Toledo — the rubber-tire capital of America.’

‘When did you finally have sex with her?’

‘Around two months after—’

‘Two months!’ she said, interrupting me. ‘What took you so damn long?’

‘I was nervous as hell. Naturally I was smitten with her — but I also knew I was playing an insanely dangerous game.’

‘What made you finally decide to sleep with her?’

‘Susan kept pushing me away at home, and Shelley kept telling me how wonderful I was … and how we should “give ourselves to each other” … even if it was just for one time.’

‘And you believed that?’

‘After two months of flirtatious chat, I thought I knew her. The thing was, I kept trying to patch up things at home.’

‘So what triggered you finally sleeping with her?’

‘I came home one night from the college and walked into Susan’s study and put my arms around her and told her how much I loved her and how I wanted things to be put right between us again. Know what her response was? “If you think that’s going to ever make me want to fuck you again, you’re completely deluded.”’

‘Charming.’

‘No — it was anything but that. The next day I saw Shelley again for coffee. She put her hand on mine and told me she wanted me, and that we had to stop being so damn cautious and …’

I fell silent.

‘Where did you go?’ Margit asked. ‘A hotel?’

‘A grim little place called Motel 6 in Toledo. It’s a chain in the States, and only twenty-four ninety-nine if you check out of the room by six p.m. Twenty-four ninety-nine meant I could pay cash, as I didn’t want the motel stay clocking up on my credit card. We really didn’t care about the look of the place, we just wanted—’

‘To fuck each other.’

‘Well, that’s a crude way of putting it, but—’

‘Completely accurate.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And the sex was wonderful?’

‘I was in love with her. I know that sounds inane — and probably strikes you as yet another example of male midlife stupidity. But it’s the truth. I fell completely for her — and she for me. Truth be told, I’d never been in this sort of realm before … never really felt this sort of … OK, I’ll say it … completeness with another person. She might have been several decades my junior, but there was no sense of gulf between us. She was so damn smart — and not just when it came to movies and books and jazz and all the other things I also loved to talk about. She was just so wise about everything …’

‘Very touching,’ Margit said.

‘Haven’t you ever been so smitten by another person you couldn’t stand being out of their presence?’

‘Once,’ she said quietly.

‘Zoltan?’

‘Someone else.’

‘What happened?’

‘This is your story, remember? So you were madly in love with your “student”. And you kept meeting twice a week at the same autoroute motel?’

‘No — after that first tryst in the Toledo motel, I ended it.’

‘Out of guilt?’

‘Absolutely. As smitten as I was, once we crossed that line I knew it had to stop immediately. Because—’

‘You feared for your job, your career?’

‘Yes, that. But also because I kept telling myself that things with Susan and I would eventually improve … that her disaffection with me was just one of those temporary dips that happen in a long marriage.’

‘Why couldn’t you have simply arranged to see your student discreetly a few times a week? That’s what she wanted, wasn’t it?’

‘Once we finally did the deed, Shelley was head over heels. And she couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t sleep with her again. I tried to explain — many times — that I simply couldn’t continue to be her lover … that as much as I was taken with her, this simply had no future …’

‘She took it badly, of course.’

‘Who could blame her? Especially as I’d been stupid. Wildly stupid — in the way that only a man can be stupid. I’d carried on an ever-escalating two-month flirtation with a very impressionable student, and then — once we finally consummated it — I broke it off.’

‘But why was that stupid? All right, you enjoyed a quasi-platonic relationship with this girl. Then you both decided to become lovers. Then you decided that it was not wise to continue as lovers. Surely, had she been emotionally more mature, she would have accepted your decision—’

‘The thing was, she was eighteen—’

‘There are emotionally mature eighteen-year-olds. She wasn’t.’

‘All during those months of holding hands in cafes, and staring dreamily into each other’s eyes, I knew that if I kept seeing her, it was all going to blow up in my face. But the thing is, I couldn’t bear the thought of not keeping it going.’

‘That’s because you were in love. That’s also why you ended it — because you knew that, once you started sleeping with her regularly, you wouldn’t be able to stop.’

‘Perhaps. But don’t you see how my thinking was so completely contradictory? I so desperately wanted her. Then when I’d finally had her …’

‘Why shouldn’t you have thought that way? And why can’t you accept that, when it comes to matters of the heart, we all do contradictory things? You know that line from Pascal — “The heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know.”’

‘You’re trying to tell me it’s “all right”, when the truth is—’

‘You resisted temptation, you acceded to temptation, then you decided to resist temptation again. End of story. But because Americans equate sex with risk and potential disaster, it wasn’t the end of the story, was it?’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘So what happened to the girl, Harry?’

‘The story goes a little haywire here. In the days after that afternoon in the motel, she started sending me love notes all the time — five a day on colored paper in my office mailbox at the college. There were just as many emails. And they all said the same thing: “ You are the love of my life … I can’t bear to be apart from you for more than another day … can we go to the motel tomorrow? ”