“She brought me her poetry sometimes and asked for my opinion, my help.”
“You were her editor.”
Zach laughed bitterly.
“I suppose I was.”
“She loved you.”
“As much as a girl of eighteen can love her thirty-one-year-old teacher. At the time, I simply assumed she cared only for her writing.”
“Eighteen means she couldn’t buy booze in the States. It doesn’t mean she couldn’t love you.”
“It does mean I shouldn’t have loved her back.”
“But you did.”
“Foolishly, yes.” His stomach churned as he relived that year, that nightmare of a year. “Or what passed for love at the time. But I never acted on it. I loved my work, loved teaching, loved my life.”
“What happened?” Nora’s questions were as relentless as any assault.
Zach took another breath. He never even allowed himself to think about that time, much less tell another soul about it. It was his burden alone.
“I was in my office late on a Friday night. I had a hundred exams to grade that weekend. I suppose I’d complained about this in class. Somehow she knew I’d be there.”
“She came to your office?”
“Yes. I was exhausted.” Suddenly Zach was back in that cramped third-floor office again. His sleeves were rolled up; his fingers were tinged with red ink. His head ached from the hours of reading, the endless concentration. He yawned, stretched, heard a noise in the hallway. “I heard footsteps in the hall and looked up. She was standing in my doorway.”
“She came to your office late at night. Shall I assume the inevitable happened?”
“It felt inevitable. She came inside without waiting for me to ask her. And then she closed the door behind her.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘I don’t have any poems tonight.’”
“And what did you say?”
Zach exhaled. “I didn’t say anything at all.”
“This shouldn’t be a bad memory for you. Tell me why it is.”
“She was…” Zach stopped and let the silence speak for itself. Behind the blindfold he closed his eyes. He remembered how easily Grace came to him, how her body relaxed against his, how his hands fit her thighs as if they’d been made to press them open again and again. And then he recalled her gasp of pain, that brief intake of breath that told him all.
“She was a virgin,” Nora said, filling in the blanks.
“Yes.”
“It’s not your fault that you didn’t know.”
“It was my fault…” Zach began and felt the guilt on him again like a knife pressed to his throat. “It was my fault I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.”
“Did she tell you to?”
“No. But I should have anyway. I had dozens of lovers before then…but never…” Zach said and though the memory was an agony, his body remembered that moment. He could still feel himself inside her tight passage. “I’d never taken such pleasure inside the body of a woman before that night.”
“How do you know it’s over?”
“Because she left me, Nora,” Zach said, letting irritation seep into his voice.
“She left you?” Nora seemed unfazed by his anger. “Aren’t you the one who packed up, boarded a plane and moved across an ocean?”
“She left me long before that.”
“Tell me.” Nora’s voice was insistent, hypnotic and musical. Unable to see, Zach felt uncoupled from the ground, unmoored. Nothing seemed real. It was easier to make his confession in this kind of darkness.