Authors: Charlotte Stein
The Professor (7 page)
My face is wet again when I finish. But I am resolved to live by those words. I put my smudged, scribbled letter into the first envelope I find, and go directly to the post office in the centre of town. I don’t even stop to fix my face, or put on clothes that do not have huge perspiration circles under the arms. Everyone will just think I recently came from the gym. No one would guess that a letter wrung me out like this. That a letter is responsible for my breathlessness, and my messy hair.
But it is. I see my reflection in a shop window and know immediately what sent my fringe sideways like that. It was all the running of my hands through it. The way I clenched it in my fist when I wrote that I would take the risk, though, by God, I would write it all again. I wouldn’t change anything – not even if he never writes back.
In fact, I am completely prepared for him not to. I don’t pace. I don’t get distracted in class, or when writing essays. I don’t even look up the first post possible from that return address he gave me. It’s somewhere in Belgium anyway, so it would probably take until the end of time even if he did respond. I can expect something next year – a tiny note after I start dating a boring banker called Ted.
And then suddenly there it is.
Not in my pigeonhole, but by my front door. I have to read it while still half-asleep and in my pyjamas, heart in my mouth, teeth worrying one broken nail.
Dearest Hetty,
I should never find your admiration amusing. It is at once miraculous to me and as painful as anything I have ever known. If I had the power to do it I would persuade you otherwise, but I suspect that any efforts I make to do so will fail. Indeed I know they shall, not only because you are incredibly stubborn and unfailingly frustrating, but because I do not truly wish it were so.
Oh, I can deny and deny all I like, but the facts of the matter are plain. You made them so in what is as much the greatest letter I have ever received as mine was to you: if I wished you away from me, if I honestly did, I would stop this. I would cease to correspond with you immediately and go about my own life, as poor and pale as it is. Yet here I am at my own book desk, even as I run as far from you as I can reasonably get. I am on a train bound for Bruges and the position I have transferred to. The train is turning every letter I write to a series of minuscule hills, though I imagine you will suspect otherwise. You will think my hand is shaking – though I swear that could never possibly be the case.
My hand never shakes when my heart thunders so. I am as adept at hiding all outward indications of emotion as you are at describing them – a lifetime of disguising my true self has all but turned me to stone. There are times, many times, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and hardly know the man who looks back at me. This still and implacable creature, as cold as the highest hill at the ends of the earth.
How did I become him?
I do not know, my Hetty. I only know that each time I speak with you I am less inclined to keep his company and wear his clothes. You have exposed them for what they are: a cheap imitation of all the things that life should really be. Whatever gift of strength I have given you, yours is the greater one. Mine has only overcome a barricade newly built against the fresh indignities and cruelties of life; yours has taken down walls built high and wide by the weight of years. It compels me to write against all my better judgement and in terms I did not know were possible.
I wish to be reasonable with you, to be rational, to tell you in the strongest terms that this cannot continue. And I have every reason in the world to – I have made it easier than anything to do so. Soon I will stand in my newly obtained apartment at the top of a towering building, and look out over an utterly spectacular city. There will be trunks to unpack and drinks to be had and museums to occupy every moment of my time. A thousand miles shall separate us.
And even so, even with all of this effort, I shall find myself thinking of you.
My thoughts always turn to you, my fellow visitor, my Hetty.
God help me, my thoughts turn to you.
Lukas
I go for a long walk after reading his words. Long enough that my muscles start to burn, and the cold air numbs my lungs. Long enough that I forget everything he said, and can come back to it fresh and clear-headed. See it with rational eyes, instead of ones that have hearts in them. But when I pick it up again, it still says all of the same things. In fact I see new ones now – like the fact that he signed it ‘Lukas’. Not ‘Professor’ or even ‘Halstrom’, but the name I addressed him by.
The one I wanted to call him, and that he now allows.
From now on, I will be Hetty and he will be Lukas. Nothing will take that back or change it. And if he tries to, if he claims it was a mistake, if he ever says he meant to stay my Professor, I will know he is lying, because of the last line. Oh, that last line. I see it behind my eyes before I go to sleep, and again when I wake in the morning. I have to go to the letter and check it is really there, as though somehow my fevered mind imagined it. No one like him would ever say, ‘My thoughts turn to you.’
But he did, he did, he did.
He said it, and he meant it.
Now I need to be equal to it.
Dearest Lukas,
There is no need to be reasonable or rational with me. I say it to you in no uncertain terms: never be, if you can stand it. If you want to stop wearing the clothes of a careful and closed-off man then throw them off. You can hardly think that I would raise an objection. On the contrary, I have thought every day, every hour, every minute of what it would be like if you were to forget all the obstacles you believe are in our way, and become something more than that shackled man you describe.
Would it really be so terrible?
It sounds to me like even you think it a wonderful thing. You talk of it like a dream you might step into, or even something you have already let go. If so, then take the final steps. Come back to me. There is no need for hesitation or prevarication. Whatever you thought was wrong about our relationship is long gone. I am not your student and you are not my Professor. Ten years is not so long when every word and gesture we make are so easily understood by the other.
I know how you will be sitting now, as you read this. One hand over the place where your watch is, as if you could remove any threat to your sense of self by fast-forwarding through time. Take it out and it will be ten hours later, instead of right now and right here reading these words. But tell me honestly, Lukas: do you want to will away those hours? Do you want to keep leaping through your own life, avoiding any pitfalls – yes, that may be true, but avoiding the pleasures too?
You impress upon me the need to not waste my life, to not spend it as you have spent yours. Yet you seem content to carry on down this broken path you’ve chosen, as though everything for you is already at an end. You are thirty-one years old, Lukas. The only way your life would almost be at an end is if you lived in 1432, which I suspect is a push even for you. Even the most mealy-mouthed assessment would suggest that you have another twenty years yet.
Would you not rather spend those twenty years putting right what you think has gone wrong? It is not too late. You might still have everything those thin dreams have to offer. They are just waiting for you to seize them. And if you believe they are silly, I will be here to tell you otherwise. If you falter in the getting of them, I will go further than you can manage and drag them back to you. I know you think I am unequal to the task, or at the very least too young to carry whatever burden you think is yours.
But you are wrong.
Can you not see you are wrong? If I was feeble and weak, would I write to you like this? Would I ask for things that even you – as powerful as you are – are unable to? Tell me honestly: if you go back to the point in your life where everything almost seemed possible, and erase whatever made you believe it wasn’t, do you think you would still give up? I know you wouldn’t. Once that impediment was gone you would forge forward with all the strength and confidence in the world.
So why do you have no faith in me, now that my impediments are gone? I am you, if someone had come to you when you were twenty-two, and told you that you were worth more than you believed possible. I am you, with someone who had faith in their ability to be brilliant. I will never forget that now, that kindness you have done me. It will always be with me, no matter where my path now leads.
Because our lives are a sum of their parts, and each part, each cog, is affected by contact with another. Miss those connections, and we go spiralling off into the darkness. We might turn backwards with the weight of one clumsy touch, or forever stay in one place because of a thousand jagged pieces always surrounding us. But the right one, the right spokes interlacing with our own, can forever move us forward.
You have helped me move forward, into the light.
Come with me now, love.
Come with me, now.
You have dwelled too long here.
Hetty
I barely have a chance to fret over his next letter.
It comes so fast it outruns my every concern. Faster than that, even, because he doesn’t wait for the post. I open my emails some time in the afternoon of that same day, tired of the essay I’m only half-writing and wanting a distraction, and there it is. There is his name, so alien in electronic form that I think it must be a mistake. I get closer to the screen, I squint. I check that I don’t know any other Halstroms. And when I’ve exhausted all other possibilities, I’m forced to accept it.
He used the Internet for me.
He signed up for an email account.
Dearest Hetty,
I should have known. I should have understood how your letters would be, and never lifted my pen at all. I knew how you can sing in words and still I thought this a grand idea! How foolish I was, how foolish I am, and yet how grateful I feel for every foolish thing I ever did when it comes to you. If I had held back for even an instant, I would never have found myself at this point. And though I want to be careful, cautious, to not fall headlong into this madness – because surely you must know it is – I find I have no desire to. Whatever this means to you, however it moves your giddy heart, or perhaps seems as a daring game might, it is double all of that to me in my dusty, tightly constrained corner.
Oh, you have no idea how I have longed for someone to correspond with in this completely overblown and ridiculous way. Indeed I know you do not, because it was your claim that I will away the time spent reading your letter. That I wish it over and done with, as if it were a bandage I might rip off before it stings. I hope you see now though how foolish such an idea was, how little you know me on that score at least, because here, look how I have stooped to this infernal device, simply so I might spend more time with your words than without them. The thought of not hearing from you for another week was more than I could reasonably stand. And if the shreds of my duty must keep me here and you there then at least let me have this. There can be no harm in this, can there?
God forgive me, if there is I scarcely care. If I cannot have you entire, then I must at least permit myself this crumb, this tiny piece of you, crammed into three hundred words. I must see the tilt of your smile in each adjective and the black of your eyes in every comma – and I do, I do, I do. There are days, terribly weak days when I press the paper to my face, and fancy I can smell your scent.
Even though I do not know what your scent is. I held my breath when you came too close – did you know that? I was afraid too much would be not enough. That I would catch the merest hint of apple blossoms or newly spilled ink or even the wool of your old tattered jumper, and want more, or worse. What if it took hold of me, and I thought of it as I lay in bed?
It was abominable to me then, but now I find I regret not taking one taste. One tiny scrap of it to sustain me as I read these words. How might I explain what it means to me to hear you say, ‘Come back’? Those two little syllables contain the world entire. I wrap them in my memory of your voice, that hint of Yorkshire licking at the C that sits at the beginning, the way it bends the word back so far it almost breaks.
What I would not give to hear you say it to me.
But I have gone on now, have I not?
I have revealed too much. I want to go to the beginning and cross it all out – start again and say that you should stop. Always, always, I consider telling you to stop. But I am selfish, Hetty. I want to hear what you say next, like a man in the middle of a mystery novel, just waiting to see what strange occurrences or thrilling reveal will happen. I fear it shall be grim indeed. It might even finish me off altogether.
But, by God, what a note to end on.
Lukas
I want to wait to reply, I really do.
But I can’t manage it. Not after him admitting he held his breath.
Not after the comment about the letter C.
Not even if he’d barely written anything at all.
He opened a door with this gesture, this switch to a century he doesn’t belong in.
And he must know it.
Dearest Lukas,
You say you must stay where you are and that I must stay here. And yet you tempt me. Can you not see how you tempt me? Your last line is almost like a dare, a challenge to see how strongly I can persuade you. It feels as though you want me to shock you into action, and if so I am equal to it. Surely you know I am? It was the reason you asked me to leave your office, even though I can promise you those efforts were weak compared to what I can manage now.
Now, there is nothing that stands in my way. I don’t have to wonder if you will be disgusted, or never speak to me again. I no longer feel the fumbling fool, trapped in a book labyrinth with a stern and forbidding man who might at any moment chastise me. At last, I am free to tell you in no uncertain terms that I want you, I want you, I want you. And if I fail at expressing this to you, or in persuading you to come back to me, it is only because English words alone are too weak for the task.
I need new ones to fully describe the great, heavy slope of your back, the shape of your hands, that faint scar that separates your top lip. And doubly so, if I were to confess to you all the things I have imagined doing to them. I have thought a thousand times of running my hand down over the back of your tweed jacket, just to get the barest hint of you beneath. Though usually when I do I do not stop there.
Why should I, when in my head I can strip you down to all that flesh? I can spread my bare body over your bare body, and feel the great bones beneath your skin shift and roll. Rise and fall with every enormous breath you take – as though you are really some impossible beast from a myth I can’t remember. I found a Minotaur in the book labyrinth that is your office, and singularly failed at being afraid.
Instead I find I just want to run my tongue over the long, long line of your spine. Over your shoulder blades, that must sit like great slabs beneath your skin, and those shoulders, oh, those shoulders…I could probably perch on one of them with very little trouble at all. Though I confess I would far rather take my seat a different way. Do you comprehend my meaning? Can you guess? I am tempted to ask and see what you will reply, but if I do then I will never get to say it for myself.
I want to feel your face between my thighs.
I ache for it, I grow wet and slippery just thinking about it. I had to get up and open a window after writing just that line alone, but I know the cool air won’t help me after I add the rest. Because your face and my thighs are not enough. They are too small and plain. They lack the thing you asked me for once: the visceral punch that you told me my best work had. They shy away from everything graphic and gory and explicit. So I will tell you as plainly as I can:
I want you to speak with that sinful voice against the curve of my cunt. Curl your tongue around my swollen clit, and then lick and lick and lick until I lose my mind. It won’t be difficult – my mind is already halfway gone. I’m writing faster than my fingers can type and no doubt littering this email with mistakes, but I don’t care. Every typo, every error, every missed bit of punctuation is a sign of what you do to me. Of what thinking of you easing your cock into my pussy does to me.
It makes me too hot inside my own clothes, too hot to stand even with the night air coming in and the breeze against the side of my face. I have to strip down to almost nothing, but even that brings no relief. Now every time I type a word I feel the silk of my skin brush over one stiff nipple – because they are stiff. I can see them when I glance down, two spiky points just waiting for your touch, your caresses, the brush of your lips. Would you, will you – are you capable of doing the things I have described?
I think yes; I think underneath the layers of tweed you are as louche and debauched as a lord from some story about swooning on a moor. That if you were given the chance you would indulge appetites even I can barely guess at – though God knows I try. My thoughts seethe with all the things you might possibly like to do. Would you like to kiss my cunt?
Or is it more than that?
Filthier than that?
Are you debased, my Lukas, in ways I am far too innocent to ever imagine? Would you get me on my knees and fill my mouth with your cock and your come? Or perhaps your proclivities run a different way. Maybe you lie in bed at night with your hand around a dick I cream at the thought of, and think of fucking my
arse. Oh, God, I get close to coming, just thinking of you doing something like that. Something reckless, and greedy.
Be greedy for me. Hold nothing back.
If we must live like this then hold nothing back.
Hetty