Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘I wanted to know how you were. We haven’t seen much of each other, and I saw that your light was on. Isn’t a supervisor supposed to provide hospitality to his advisees?’

‘Not at midnight usually, at least not when it’s just the two of them, and the supervisor is a man and the student a woman.’

‘Are you calling me inappropriate?’

‘No, no, I am calling you nothing. I am merely observing that this is an exceptional situation and I would like to know your intentions.’

‘To be hospitable. To pass the hours. I can’t help noticing how much time you spend alone in your room, however often your mother might take you to lunch. You seem to be working hard. Sometimes it’s not a bad thing to relax and leave the desk. Mens sana and all that.’

‘I relax. I swim at the university pool four times a week. An hour each time.’

‘Then I guess you have no need of my hospitality. You’re free to go. You should not feel obliged.’

She put down her glass on the side table between the couch and my chair. ‘Don’t be English like that. You’re not English and English manners don’t suit you. I prefer the direct American you are in your other affairs. I prefer the professor who tells me when the work is bad and who praises me when it is good, not like these English people who hum and haw and expect you should read between the lines and know that when they say something isn’t quite right they mean it’s fucking terrible and when they say you’ve done quite well they mean you’re exceptionally brilliant. I find it grotesque and dishonest, all this indirectness and euphemism. It makes life unhappy.’

Whatever was said next I no longer remember. I have a distinct memory, though, of standing up and lingering at the step leading into the kitchen. Perhaps I gave Fadia a meaningful look, but however it happened she followed me back along the dogleg hall and upstairs to the master bedroom at the front of the house, where the curtains were still open just wide enough that we could both look over to the windows of her own darkened bedroom.

‘Do you watch me every night?’

‘Not every. Many. Did you know before now?’

‘I wasn’t sure. I thought I might have been imagining it.’

Over the next hour my mind submerged itself in the beauty of what was happening, sinking happily in the shallows at the same time I was conscious of the more terrible depths close to hand: terror at what I had allowed myself to become, this predator of younger women, of someone who was in my power, whose life I could make difficult if I chose, though I could not imagine doing anything so cruel, and then, as we lay next to each other in the dark, I was conscious of her eyes on my body, the force of her gaze on my skin, and I thought of Ham and Noah, and that first sin of voyeurism, the way I had opened my body, my person, made myself vulnerable, like Noah lying uncovered within his tent , how I had allowed her to penetrate me nearly as profoundly as I had penetrated her, that in seeing me like this, looking upon my nakedness, she had entered me just as I had entered her. I reached across to take her hand and hold it.

‘Is this the beginning of something?’ I asked.

‘Shared hospitality, you called it. Does it have to be more?’

We slept beside each other but she left before dawn, slipping out as the milkman came whirring up the street in his electric cart. Alone in bed I inhaled her scent on the sheets, and the face of that blond Egyptian boy at Georgetown came back to me: same smell, same unfamiliar familiarity. I am living in a novel, I thought, watching as Fadia appeared in her window across the street and quickly closed the blinds against me. In my case, however, the campus melodrama leads to something else, to a different genre of complication.

Over the course of the next few weeks we met every night or two, always at my house. There was no expectation on my part that sex would necessarily follow the drink and conversation we shared, and on each subsequent meeting I waited for Fadia to signal if she wished for something more, allowing her to lead us back down the hall and up the stairs. Once or twice we left it at a drink and nothing more.

‘I feel I should clarify,’ I said at one point, perhaps a week after the first meeting, ‘that whatever it is we are doing, this shared hospitality, it will in no way impinge on our work together.’

‘You mean that if I say to you I want to stop this, you won’t suddenly make my life difficult, Jeremy.’

‘Precisely. I want you to feel in control.’

‘But I am in control.’ I can see her, as I write this now, sitting up a little straighter on the couch and finishing a glass of wine. ‘As a test, I’ll say goodnight to you and leave you wondering if there will even be a next time.’

‘Is that a test for me, or for you?’

‘For us both.’

After more than a dozen such meetings, in the course of which I began to imagine continuing in this way until we felt ourselves able to go public, perhaps even until I asked her — or she asked me — to formalize our relationship, whatever the consequences for either of us, Fadia abruptly stopped responding to my messages. One day communication, a bantering exchange of plans, and then, without warning, silence from her end, the blinds in her room always closed, although I could tell when the lights were on, was able to watch her shadow passing, and observed her coming and going from the house in the mornings and evenings, feeling all the while I could not in good conscience — not if I were to mitigate my breach in decorum and ethics and policy (God knows I must have broken countless University and College and Faculty statutes by sleeping with a student) — ask her to explain herself, demand to know why I was suddenly being locked out, why she would no longer acknowledge me. Look at me, I wanted to say, look at me and tell me what I have done wrong.

A month passed in which Fadia maintained her silence and I my watchfulness, waiting for a shift, just as sudden as the first, to bring me back into favor. I did not want to become the obsessive professor knocking on the young student’s door or hectoring her with emails and text messages, trailing her to the library or, indeed, the university pool, though I found myself one day thinking of buying a new swimming suit until I realized the destination of the route along which my mind was leading me. Professionally there was no reason for us to meet until later in the spring and I was confident we had parted such that when we did meet again there would be no awkwardness, however odd in retrospect those nights together began to seem, the invitations extended, each evening’s seated dance of seductive hospitality, the frank business of retiring to a bed.

And although I had invited her over in the first place, and was the first to lead us up the stairs, the passing weeks without message or phone call began to make me feel, perversely, as if she was the one who had been using me. This was not so much unpleasant as surprising, for I had never felt it before with any other woman, certainly not with Susan, who seemed to suffer the mechanics of sex with patience and goodwill rather than enjoying the act, and while this was a small factor in our gradual growing apart it was not the force driving the ruptures which had opened between us over the course of many years. Or, I wonder now, was I misreading the situation with Fadia entirely? Was her aloofness an indication that what we were doing was not, in fact, something she desired?

During that month of silence I became more assiduous about dressing and undressing with the curtains closed, hiding my nakedness from Fadia in her room across the street as much as from the rest of the world. Oxford is a small enough city that anyone might be passing — students or colleagues, other employees of my College or the university.