Chapter Text
Everyone slept with everyone, but everyone also knew that the Pro's son was off limits.
That's how my first year was at Arlington. It was also my last, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It was the late seventies, we were at a liberal arts college, and no one had heard of AIDS yet, so the students changed partners openly and us teachers were invited to all the parties and if one of us happened to leave with a pretty freshman or a handsome senior, no one batted an eye.
It wasn't talked about, of course. It was still small-town New England, for heaven's sake. But it was in Arlington where I for the first time found out what it was like when a boy—or should I say a man, he was twenty, after all—put his hands on me and a few days later, his mouth.
The only one who never walked with a girl on his arm or got caught in the corridor with a classmate was Elio Perlman, the son of the linguistics professor. Elio was a year smarter than his peers and already a freshman despite his mere seventeen years. A year smarter and a year more beautiful, I thought, even though I wouldn't have dared to admit it to anyone.
He was in my Greek class, too, always sitting by the window, light hitting the swoop of hair that fell over his eyes in the late October afternoons. I'd avoid his eyes because I'd once stumbled and mixed up Athena and Aphrodite in front of his intent gaze that he probably gave all his teachers.
”He’s just very eager to learn,” his father once said through his pastrami sandwich when he’d invited me to sit with him at lunch. He sighed; it was just him and Elio now and had been for a long time, the mother of the family having passed away when Elio was an infant. ”He says he wants to become a writer, so he devours every book he gets his hands on. A never-ending appetite that boy has,” was Professor Samuel Perlman’s verdict on his son.
It was only one of the things that set Elio apart from his classmates: the yearning for knowledge as if his life depended on it, while all that his peers thought about was the next Friday night party.
I don't remember whose idea it was, mine or his or his father's. But there was a statewide essay contest for undergraduates of Greek studies and while he wanted to write about the era of the Persian invasion, the first year curriculum didn’t cover it, so it was decided that I would tutor him once a week.
I tried to get out of it, for reasons I'm sure you understand, but I was the only Greek professor at Arlington, so he was stuck with me. And I was stuck with him, spending every Friday afternoon in my office on the first floor of the Towerhouse building, him on the couch and me behind the desk that hid my occasional hard-on.
They didn't come often, not at the beginning. The boy sat up straight, with his notebook and pen ready to go, listening and making notes. Over time, however, he would learn to sit back, to let his shoulders relax and occasionally he'd even look at me and skip the note-taking altogether. Those were the dangerous moments for me, the ones where our eyes met and I couldn't look away as easily as I could have, had we been in a classroom full of other students.
I would shift closer to my desk, the decades-old teak hiding my crotch when his oxford shirt would gape without an undershirt, or a loose sweatshirt would fall off of his bony shoulder. Pro Perlman kept buying him clothes at sizes that he thought his son would grow into, like he was still a child.
Elio, on the other hand, had a terrible habit of chewing at the end of his pencil, putting the thing in his mouth and letting his teeth show when he'd think about something I'd just said. His tongue would play with the rubber end, playing peek-a-boo to taunt whatever was going on under my desk.
Over the fall months he’d become bolder too and dare to challenge me, leading us to debate heatedly on the virtues of Apollo or the copycats of Heraclitus. There were times when I was sure he hated me and only kept coming because he was ambitious about his essay and wanted the tutoring. On those days, he would avoid my eyes and while it made certain things easier, it also lodged something unsettling in me. And then there were those few glorious Fridays when there was an angel on my couch, bathing in the golden afternoon light, melodic laughter spilling from his lips as he got all my jokes and the debates were thrilling, the student on his way to becoming the master.
That particular Friday in January, however, he'd been more uptight than usual. He’d almost gone back to the reserved demeanor of our first weeks of tutoring, and a group of students walked past my office when he was leaving at the end of the hour. They were raucious and to make conversation, I asked Elio if there was going to be a party that night, as if I hadn't known fully well that it was the first one after the winter break and that it was Benedict Wright's week to host. Benny was a senior and he and his roommate shared the largest dorm room at the Woolley residence hall.
Elio shook his head. ”I’m not going.”
He often did, though.
I knew that because I'd seen him at them, sitting on a window sill with a sarcastic if not superior demeanor, long legs pulled messily underneath him like a young colt.
Once or twice I'd seen him participating in the adolescent kissing games the students ironically reveled in; ones where he’d been goaded into planting one on a girl on one time and a boy on the next. I'd watched it with a decidedly jaded look on my face, or so I'd hoped at least, but the latter of those two times had turned my stomach in a very different way. The other boy had ended it first, leaving Elio's cheeks flushed when the fellow students sitting in the circle taunted him for having wanted to go on.
”Why aren't you going?” I asked Elio as he was packing his notes into his backpack. ”To the party.”
He shrugged. ”Don't feel like it. Why? Are you going then, professor?”
”I'll probably stop by.” It was the expected routine, teachers showing up if they didn't want to be considered a bore. Especially us young ones; at twenty-four, I only had a few years on my students.
”It's at Benny’s.”
”I know.”
I do think it was probably me who suggested the tutoring. He might've mentioned the essay contest and I would’ve wanted to help. His father had made my arrival to a new school easier, so I had wanted to pay it forward.
That Friday night it didn't take very long for Sally Longbourne to suggest the Seven Minutes in Heaven again and Benny Wright’s big closet was perfect for it. Elio had shown up too after all, like I’d suspected he would, but I was disappointed in their choice of game. In Heaven, the viewers couldn't see anything. I would not be able to go home with a new image to glue onto my previous ones in that particular corner of my mind, an image of his boyish face pursing his lips, leaning in more than it was wise to.
But it was all the same, since Elio left the room before the game even began.
I found him outside, sitting in the dark on the steps of the Woolley when I left soon after. Our breaths visible in the January air, we talked for a moment; he promised to have his first draft of the essay ready for next Friday. He'd work on it over the weekend.
”You didn’t care to stay?” I then asked, referring to the party. “They were just starting to play.”
“That’s not the type of game I enjoy.”
“It’s not? Doesn’t the whole student body live for Fridays and new faces to disappear into the closet with?” I left out the part where they’d then leave the party to do more things to each other and for longer than seven minutes. It was implied, though, as Elio must have heard the same noises from behind the closed doors as I had.
He only huffed.
“No one in there you’d like to kiss?” I pressed on.
“In there?” he specified. “No.”
I should’ve left our conversation at that, taken a brisk walk across the frosty yard back to Towerhouse where my room sat right above my office. Instead, I asked: ”Aren’t you cold out here?”
He tightened the big scarf that was unceremoniously wrapped around his shoulders and neck, his face dwarfed by the thick woolen folds. “No, but you must be, professor.” His eyes assessed me in my shirt sleeves, arms crossed in front of my chest and the sleeves pushed up from the wrists in my effort to appear more relaxed at the party.
“I was planning to make a quick exit back to Towerhouse,” I said by way of explaining my lack of outdoor attire and fought back a shiver.
“I see. I live at the Swan.”
“I know, you’ve mentioned it.”
“It’s right behind Towerhouse.”
His eyes never let up and the moonlight did the same to his features as the afternoon sun had done and more, sweeping silver dust across the tops of his cheekbones. He ran his hand through his hair and I knew I needed to get going, because there was no desk here.
But he got up, walked with me all the way to Towerhouse and the old, dried vines snaking up the red brick buildings absorbed all the light around us, leaving us in soft, forgiving darkness when he stopped me at the bottom of the stairs.
He did it all without saying a word, not before or after.
Cutting in front of me, he stepped up to the first step before I got to. He was tall for his age but this was the first time his eyes were at my eye level, the tip of his nose directly in the path of mine. He held my gaze, calm and serene like the two of us alone in the dark was the most natural of things, and I no longer felt the shivers. Moving closer and positioning his face and his mouth right in front of mine, he waited. A bait set for an animal. The breath from his nostrils dancing on my face he waited, and I couldn’t resist.
The kiss was both lighter and heavier than I'd ever experienced, his eyes staying closed long after. It was thorough, too, and there was none of his blushing hesitation here. Much later, I asked him how that was possible.
“I’ve watched people all my life. I knew you wanted it, even more than I did.”