Zach would have been a pacer. If he could have, he would have walked a trench across the front of his classroom. Instead, he drummed his fingers. Every few minutes he lifted himself up by pressing the heels of his hands hard against his armrests. From my seat in the corner I watched him as he lectured, occasionally catching myself chewing the end of a pen or twirling my hair around one finger. As time went on I started attending all of his classes, unless he sent me somewhere else. Watching him talk was a highpoint in my day, although he barely looked at me once he got going. On rare occasions I’d picture him standing at the front of the room, walking distractedly back and forth as he spoke—but those images in my mind never seemed real and they’d fade quickly.
The day I realized I wasn’t the only one with a crush on the teacher was a Wednesday. It was late afternoon and he was berating his four-hundred level fiction class. Slightly uncomfortable at the unharnessed emotion of the young woman behind me who was sniffling into her sleeve, I was trying to feign interest in the stack of papers in front of me, but my eyes kept wandering to the front of the room.
“I mean it, were any of you paying attention?” His fingers tapped on his knee. “Most of you are journalism majors—how do you expect to get jobs writing when you can’t write what you’re told? These stories were appallingly mundane. I don’t even want to hear any more of them. You all need to go home and delete the file this shit came from—get rid of it. Start over. Throw the whole fucking computer out the window. And remember, your ultimate goal as an artist is to generate emotion—I want to read something I’ll think about on my deathbed, do you understand?”
The fifteen people behind me shuffled papers sheepishly for a moment before he snapped at them to get out. While they made for the exit he looked over at me, scowling.
“Was I an asshole?”
“Did you hear yourself?” I laughed. “Just slightly.”
He rolled his neck on his shoulders. “Well. They gave me a headache.”
“Mr. DiMarro?” One of his students had turned around on her way out the door.
He looked up at her without bothering to stop scowling. “Carolina.”
Carolina, in her hip-huggers and tight green t-shirt, stood clutching several pieces of paper. I gathered from the fact that her Peruvian accent was more pronounced than usual that she was either nervous or upset, both common states for students about to engage “Mr.DiMarro”. I watched them out of the corner of my eye as I packed up my things.
“I didn’t get to turn in my story, Mr.DiMarro—because I was out of town last week. So, I just wanted to…” she offered him the pages, which he took and placed in his lap. “I don’t think it’s terrible. What you said to the class, I mean; I think… mine is better.”
She squared her shoulders as she spoke, gathering confidence. “I wondered if you would, after you read it, would you call me? My number is on the paper there. Please? I would like very much to talk with you about my work.”
Zach continued staring up at her in silence for a few seconds before he smiled and nodded. “Yes, Carolina, if I have time I’ll call you.”
She beamed at him and reached out to shake his hand. “Thank you, Mr.DiMarro. I will be waiting, then. Goodbye.”
As she turned on her heel her thick chestnut curls bounced off her shoulders and down her back. He kept watching her as she walked off. I slammed a three ring binder on the desk behind him, startling him.
“She’s very eager to please, isn’t she?”
He shrugged. “She’s the best writer in the class. She doesn’t need to try very hard. And I think it’s impressive she writes so well in the third language she learned.”
“She wants to sleep with you.” That was meant to be internal monologue, but somehow it didn’t work out that way.
He snorted. “I doubt it.”
I walked by him quickly, making an effort to focus my eyes on my bag and not him. “Well, why don’t you call her and see?”
As I reached the doorway he said my name, causing me to look back at him impatiently.
He opened his mouth, closed it again and shook his head. “Will you be by later?”
I shrugged. “Unless you’re busy.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The next afternoon I was sitting with Zach in a restaurant when the control I had over my petulance wore off. Poking at my eggplant with my fork, I asked if he’d read Carolina’s story. He nodded absentmindedly as he took a sip of his drink.
“So, that meeting will…”
“Was it good?”
“What?”
“Carolina’s story. How was it?”
He squinted at me. “Why?”
“Because. I’m just… curious. Did you call her?”
He sighed, took another drink and then leaned back in his chair, staring at me through narrowed eyes. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing is wrong with me. I’m just interested in your students’ work. Its part of my job, you know?”
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?” My back went up when I saw the sudden light in his eyes. It was as if I’d lit a fuse inside his head.
“Bullshit you’re interested in my students’ work. You’re jealous.”
I was immediately very sick. “What? You’re an egomaniac.”
His blue eyes were unblinking, his hands folded in his lap. “Jealous. I just don’t know why.”
“Zach, I’m married. I…”
“And is that a happy marriage, Katy? You’re perfectly satisfied—you want to tell me you’re a content little bride…”
“It’s none of your fucking business if I’m satisfied in my marriage.”
“It’s none of your fucking business what I do with Carolina.” He said pleasantly.
He was enjoying himself. Of course he would be, having defeated my argument so simply, so quickly. I, on the other hand, felt like I might need a cardiologist. Beads of sweat had broken out on my forehead and my heart was racing.
“Yes,” I finally said, weakly.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I am happy in my marriage.”
He just looked at me for a long time. When he finally spoke again it was to continue listing our next week’s itinerary, as if the other conversation had never taken place.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zach and I met in March of 2008, three months after I came home from Kathmandu. It was almost a year later, at the end of February, in a Chicago hotel room, that he kissed me for the first time. It was dusk, and we’d been drinking; we were watching the snow fall from the window of his hotel room. It would have been awkward, with me lying sideways on the bed and him in his wheelchair, if we hadn’t both been expecting it for so long. We had been talking about the weather in various of our respective childhood memories and then he just looked over at me, caught my attention. I leaned closer to him and put a hand on the arm of his wheelchair because I was suddenly unsteady. Then he kissed me, one hand holding on to the wheel of his chair and the other on the back of my head. His lips were firm against mine and he grazed me gently with his teeth; he tasted like liquor and pizza, and I had been waiting for him forever. Not just since we met, or since I started working for him, or since I fell in love with him—but forever, since I read his first book when I was seventeen (he was twenty-four, the young genius) and since before that, when he was only the faceless presence in my adolescent dreams.
He kissed me, and then he pulled back and looked at me as if he, and not I, had just committed a mortal sin. “I’m so sorry.”
“Please don’t be sorry, Zach.” I sat up, hung my legs over the bed and held onto his hand. He watched the snow fall out the window, sipped scotch from a plastic cup.
Across the room, his laptop began to play Courtney Love’s “Sugar Coma”. Outside, the snow fell. Zach put his cup between his legs and started to wheel away from me. Hundreds of miles away I had a husband, who loved me, who was working very hard to save the lives of other people. There I was, locked in a room with my hero, my friend, the man I was more in love with than I’d ever expected I’d love anything. And he’d kissed me. And he was pulling away.
I didn’t mean to start sobbing, but there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it once it began. Zach, startled as he always was by sudden emotion, came back to sit beside me, put a hand on my calf and called my name. I cried into the sleeves of my sweater until I thought I would choke. Eventually, concerned, he moved awkwardly from the chair onto the bed, pulled himself slowly into a sitting position against the headboard and then tugged at me. I lay my head in his lap, curled up in a ball wishing I could reach my drink.
“What are we going to do, Katy?” he said quietly when I was done crying. He reached for the bottle beside the bed. I sat up, took it from his hand and turned it up.
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want to kiss you again.”
His blue eyes were huge and round, rimmed in red. He kissed me, and then pulled away again. “I don’t think you want to do this, Katy-girl. It’s a real bad idea.” His voice was bitter.
“I haven’t wanted to do anything else for a long time, Zach.”
He shook his head and cleared his throat. “No. No. You really don’t understand. Katy,” he gestured at his wheelchair. “You know what that’s all about? You’ve never asked.”
“It doesn’t bother me, I don’t care. I just want to be with you.”
“Katy, listen to me. I’m not in that chair because I got hurt. I’m in the chair because I’m sick—because I have a serious, degenerative illness. I’m not just crippled, I’m dying. So, whatever this is that we’re doing here, I want you to think about it very seriously before it goes any further.”
There was no more air in the room, and I was sick. Dizzy and hot, I shook my head in an attempt to clear it. Zach took another swig of scotch and refused to raise his eyes to mine.
“I’m sorry, Katy.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t believe you.” Balancing myself by holding on to the wall, I stood up and walked to the other side of the room. The computer had the nerve to start up another sad song and I slammed it shut.
“I’m talking about MS,” he said. “It was progressing pretty rapidly, at first. Mostly, now, it seems to have leveled off. Secondary-progressive multiple sclerosis. Right now it’s not so bad—fatigue and muscle spasms and weakness in my legs, lack of muscle control, tremor in my hands sometimes. I can’t feel my feet. But it can start tearing me down again at any minute. There’s nothing I can do about it, if those horrible injections don’t work...”
“But, Zach, people live with MS for years, for decades-- they have whole lives…” There was desperation in my voice so that it shook. I wanted to call Bijendra, to have him explain the disease to me in detail and make me believe it wasn’t going to kill anyone I loved.
“Some people. And some people die in their sleep. And some people go into a coma and hang on there for months while the paralysis takes over their respiratory organs.”
“Fuck you. You don’t know what’s going to happen to you, this isn’t a book, you don’t know.”
He shrugged, shook his head. “Maybe. But why should I expect the best, Katy? I got sick in the first place. It crippled me, why shouldn’t it kill me?”
I went back to sit on the edge of the bed. He offered me the bottle again.
“Should you be drinking?” I asked him.
“Don’t start that.”
I took a big gulp of the hot, disgusting liquor, felt my head swimming as it went down. He was sitting with his back against the headboard of his bed, his legs thin and still, straight out in front of him. I touched his wasted calf muscle lightly with my fingertips.
“I had wondered,” I said, quietly.
“I meant to tell you. A thousand times. But, I knew…” he sighed. “I knew there was this thing between us, and I’m selfish. I’m very selfish. I wanted it to happen.”
“But, Zach, your being sick doesn’t change the thing between us. It doesn’t change anything.”
He shook his head. “You can’t mean that. Think about it. I know you and Bijendra have problems, but he’s a good man, and he can take care of you. He can take care of you for the rest of your life. I can’t do that. I can’t even take care of you now,” he snorted derisively and gestured to his lap. “I can’t give you anything you need. You don’t want to fuck up your marriage, your life; not for me.”
I crawled up to the top of the bed to sit beside him. I pressed my shoulder against his as I leaned into him and held his hand in mine, tightly. I wrapped my leg around his so that we were twined together like a pastry. A little scared of what he would do in response, I leaned over and parted my lips. He kissed me. He squeezed my hand until it was painful and he kissed me hard, like kissing might save both of us from the fate he imagined was waiting for him. After a moment my hand moved for his crotch. Instead of responding like I’d wanted him to, he laughed slightly.
“It won’t do any good, Katy. It doesn’t matter.” He moved away from me, placing his palms on the bed and scooting himself a few inches closer to his chair. “I’ll get hard for five minutes if you’re lucky.”
I was still for a moment, and then I looked up at him, then I reached out to touch his cheek instead. “Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay you can’t fuck me, and okay you’re not immortal.”
I let my head fall forward so our foreheads were touching. I held his hands in mine, rubbing each slightly trembling finger individually with mine, thinking while I did so about the things his fingers had done, the things they’d written and the way they’d affected me and the world. I was overwhelmed by him, as I always was when I stopped long enough to think about it; but this time I was touching him, and this time I knew he wanted me, too.
His breath was hot on my face, laced with scotch and much more intoxicating. “I don’t want to ruin your life.”
“Oh, it’s way too late.”