A Plea for Eros

elevated but was often merely wrong. Eventually, I came to recognize that there were signs of schizophrenia in the writing, but that wasn’t until later. I had private sessions with all my students. These meetings were required, and when I met with him, I urged simplicity and hiding his thesaurus forever. The trouble began when he was no longer my student. He would barge into my office unannounced and throw unwanted gifts onto my desk—records, perfume, magazines. He, too, had a penchant for inexplicable transformations, for flannel shirts one day and silky feminine tops the next. On a balmy afternoon in late April, he visited me wearing a fur coat. Another time, I looked up to find him standing in my little graduate-assistant cubicle, his fingers busily unbuttoning his shirt. This story rings with comedy now, but I was aghast. In my best schoolteacher voice, I shouted, “Stop!” He looked terribly hurt and began stamping his foot like a three-year-old, whining my
first
name, as though he couldn’t believe I had thwarted him. After that, he would park himself outside the classroom where I taught and stare at me. If I looked a little to the right, I would see him in my peripheral vision. The staring unnerved me, and after several days of it, I was scared. When I crossed the campus, he would follow me—an omnipresent ghost I couldn’t shake. Talking to him did no good. Yelling at him did no good. I went to the college police. They were indifferent to my alarm. No, more than that, they were contemptuous. I had no recourse. In time, the student gave up, and my ghost disappeared, never to bother me again. The question is, What does this story exemplify? Would it be called “sexual harassment” now, because of the shirt episode? Was it stalking? What he actually
did
to me was innocuous. The fear came from the fact that what he did was unpredictable. He did not play by the rules, and once those rules had been broken, I imagined that anything was possible.
    Neither of these staring experiences was erotic for me, but they may have been for the two young men who did the staring. Who I was for either of them remains a mystery to me, a blank filled with my own dread. They have lasted inside me as human signs of the mysteries of passion, of emotional disturbance and tumult, and despite the unpleasantness they caused me, I am not without compassion for both of them. I have stared myself. Looking hard is the first sign of eros, and once, when I was fourteen, I found myself staring very hard at a house. I had fallen in love with a boy who was fifteen. He cared nothing for me and was involved with a girl who had what I didn’t have: breasts. She fascinated me almost as much as he did, because, after all, she was his beloved, and I studied her carefully for clues to her success. One Saturday in the fall, I walked to his house, stood outside on the sidewalk, and stared at it for a long time. I’m not sure why I did this. Perhaps I hoped he would walk out the door, or maybe I thought I might gain the courage to ring the bell. I remember that the house looked deserted. Probably no one was home. It was a corner house on a beautiful street in Northfield, lined with elms. The elms are all dead now, but I remember the street with trees. That house, which once was his house, is still suffused with the memory of my terrible ache for him, a longing I found almost unbearable and which was never requited. Years later, when I was grown (much taller than he ever grew) and I saw him in a local bar, he remembered my “crush” and said he regretted not acting on it. As silly as it sounds, this confession of his gave me real satisfaction, but the fact is he didn’t want the fourteen-year-old I had been but the twenty-two-year-old I had become—-another person altogether.
    Ogling should be legal. Looking is part of love, but what you see when you look is anybody’s guess. Why that skinny ninth-grade boy with glasses sent me into paroxysms of longing I couldn’t tell you, but he did. Feelings are crude. The ache of love feels remarkably like the ache of grief or guilt. Emotional pain isn’t distinguishable by feeling, only by language. We give a name to the misery, not because we recognize the feeling but because we know its context. Sometimes we feel bad and don’t know why or don’t remember why. Mercifully, love is sometimes equal and two people, undisturbed by the wrong underwear or the wrong nose, find each other inside this