Broken Blossom

The first time I saw Mira she was standing in the doorway of my seminar room holding a stack of books against her chest like a shield. Introduction to Postcolonial Literature, Wednesdays at two. I'd been teaching it for eleven years and I could tell within five minutes which students would drop by week three. Mira wasn't one of them. She sat in the back corner, took notes in a small precise hand, and never said a word for the first month.

She came to office hours in October. I remember because the campus maples had turned and the light through my window was the color of weak tea. She stood in the doorway the same way she had that first day, books against her chest, and asked if she could sit.

"Of course," I said. "That's what the chair's for."

She laughed too quickly, a nervous sound, and sat down with her back very straight. She wanted to talk about Spivak. She'd underlined half the essay and had questions about the subaltern, about whether silence could be a form of speech. Good questions, actually. Better than what I usually got. I answered them and watched her write down what I said, and when she left she thanked me twice.

That became a thing. Every Thursday, two o'clock, Mira in the doorway. She never missed a week. Sometimes she had real questions about the reading. Sometimes she just wanted to sit and talk. She told me she was from San Jose, that her parents ran a dry cleaning business, that she was the first in her family to go to a university like this one. She said it like it was a confession.

I'm forty-seven. I've been married for nineteen years. My wife Ellen teaches high school biology and we have a daughter at Berkeley who calls on Sundays. I mention this because you need to know what kind of man I am, or what kind I thought I was. The kind who notices a pretty student and does nothing about it. The kind who is flattered by attention and knows better than to act on it. I'd been that kind of man for two decades.

Mira was different. Not because she was young, though she was, twenty-one to my forty-seven. Not because she was beautiful, though she was that too, in a way that seemed to embarrass her. She was different because she looked at me like I was the first person who had ever taken her seriously. And I won't pretend that didn't do something to me.

The Thursday before Thanksgiving she came in and closed the door. She'd never done that before. I noticed it the way you notice a change in the weather, a shift in pressure.

"Can I ask you something personal?" she said.

"You can ask."

She sat down and put her hands in her lap and looked at them. "How did you know? When you were my age. How did you know you were ready to, you know. Be with someone."

I leaned back in my chair. "That's a big question."

"I know."

"Are you asking about a specific person?"

She shook her head. "No. I mean yes. I mean. I don't know." She looked up at me and her face was doing something complicated. "I've never. I haven't. Done that."

The radiator under my window kicked on with a clang. I remember that sound because it filled the silence and gave me a second to think.

"You're asking me for advice about sex," I said.

"I'm asking you for advice about being ready." She said it carefully, like she'd rehearsed it. "You're the only person I know who seems like he'd tell me the truth."

I should have said something wise. Something about waiting for the right person, about not rushing, about how the first time is rarely the best time and how that's okay. I've thought about that moment a lot since. What I actually said was: "The truth is nobody's ever ready. You just decide."

She nodded slowly. "Okay," she said. "Okay."

She didn't come the next week. Thanksgiving. I didn't think about it, or I told myself I didn't. Then the Thursday after that she was in the doorway again, books against her chest, and everything was normal. Except it wasn't. She sat closer to my desk than she used to. She looked at me differently. And when she left she touched my arm, just for a second, just above the elbow, and I felt it for an hour afterward like a burn.

December came. Finals. She aced my class, of course. I posted grades on a Tuesday and she emailed me that night, just a thank you, and I wrote back a you're welcome, and that should have been the end of it.

It wasn't.

She showed up at my office the day after grades were due. Campus was empty. The halls had that echo they get when everyone's gone. She was wearing a coat I hadn't seen before, gray wool, and she didn't sit down. She stood in front of my desk with her hands in her pockets.

"I have one more question," she said.

"I'm listening."

"I want you to be the one."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. The radiator was silent, the whole building was silent, and I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears.

"I've thought about it for months," she said. Her voice was steady. She'd practiced this too. "I trust you. I don't want it to be some boy at a party who doesn't care. I want it to be someone who knows what he's doing. Someone I can talk to after."

"Mira."

"I know you're married. I know you're my professor. I know all of it. I'm not asking you to leave your wife. I'm not asking you to love me. I'm asking you for one thing and then I'll never ask you for anything again."

She pulled her hands out of her pockets. She was shaking. Not much, just a tremor in her fingers that she tried to hide by clasping them together.

"You don't have to answer now," she said. "I just wanted you to know what I want. So you can decide."

She left. The door clicked shut behind her and I sat in my chair for a long time without moving. Outside the window the light was going gray and the maples were bare and I could see my own reflection in the glass, a middle-aged man in a cardigan, and I didn't recognize him.

I went home. I ate dinner with Ellen. We watched a movie and I don't remember what it was about. I lay in bed next to my wife and stared at the ceiling and thought about a girl standing in my office with her hands in her pockets, shaking, asking me to be her first.

I should have said no. I know that. I knew it then.

But here's the thing nobody tells you about being the kind of man who does nothing. Eventually you stop being that man. You don't decide to. It just happens, the way you don't decide to get older or to stop recognizing yourself in the mirror. One day you're standing at the edge of something and the next day you've already stepped off.

I emailed her the next morning. Two words. Come by.

She came.