He took an astronomy class his first semester at SF State in the spring, after taking four years to get through junior college. He was bored, and had been since middle school, so it didn't matter much to him what classes he took.
It would be simplest just to picture him as eleven. His first grade teacher had once described him as "delightfully immature." The redeeming modifier had long since ceased to apply. He dressed indifferently, bathed occasionally, and did not dance or look directly at other people. At the occasional party he was invited to, he would go into the kitchen and wash the dishes. He had never kissed a girl. He was quite talkative on any subject unrelated to intimacy. He sometimes imagined other people either couldn't hear him or weren't listening, and compensated for this by talking loudly. He craved attention, and was oblivious to the fact that, when he got it, it was usually for the wrong reasons. He was actually better off alone, not constantly having to reconcile his own idea of himself with everyone else's. He hadn't learned this yet.
The class was called Stellar Astronomy. It was an upper-division class for astronomy majors. There was a lot of math, which he had avoided since high school. He bought a scientific calculator and learned how to use it, or at least most of it. Stellar magnitudes were exponential, so he needed to familiarize himself with the power and log keys. He remembered powers and roots, and eventually figured out that logarithms solved power equations where the power was unknown. He had trouble with trigonometric functions. Most of the class was in the same predicament he was.
He sat next to a woman in the class. She was more than quiet; she was self-possessed to the point of being eccentric. She sat like a stone idol, never speaking to anyone or looking around or even turning her head. She looked at the teacher when he spoke, and down at her desk when he didn't. She was wrapped in a shawl that seemed intended to discourage attention. It didn't work in his case; he noticed her mainly because she looked so out of place, which he knew he was. He thought at first that she wasn't bad looking, but because of her hair he couldn't really tell. She had collar-length blonde hair, which she refused to tuck behind her ears, and so it hung down, screening her face when viewed from the side. For this reason, and because she never turned her head, and because he was afraid to look at her, he only got an occasional glimpse of her face.
The teacher was a pleasant man in his late twenties. He was knowledgeable about astronomy, but less so about teaching. One day the teacher wrote a series of calculations on the blackboard, which he called the Stefan-Boltzmann law. The teacher said they could be used to determine the energy radiated by a black body, given its size and temperature. The calculations covered half the blackboard. Everyone looked at the board. No one said anything.
He raised his hand and asked the teacher what a black body was. The teacher said it was a star. He asked why a star would be called a black body. The teacher said it was just a technical term having several applications, one of which modeled a generic star. He asked what was the long curved diagonal line in the equation with the infinity sign at the top and the zero at the bottom. The teacher said it was the symbol for an integral. He asked what an integral was. The teacher looked around the class, perhaps hoping to find a consensus of scorn for the question among the other students. Not finding it, he looked at the blackboard, thought for a moment, and then said not to worry, the class wouldn't be required to know the calculations. The teacher then erased the blackboard. In the hallway after class, two other students came up to him and thanked him. At the next class the woman asked him if he wanted to study with her.
She was taciturn, unaffected, unsentimental, and almost humorless. She was seven years older than he and had been married, but now was alone with a child. He was unable to make her laugh on purpose, but occasionally did inadvertently. She told him that he said out loud what other people were thinking. The more he looked at her, the nicer looking she got. She really was lovely, way out of his league, and he could tell she was aware of it, although she didn't act anything like a woman who knew she was attractive. She seemed to regard beauty as a burden she was tired of carrying. He couldn't decide if she liked him or was just putting up with him in order to get the study help. She wasn't even pretending to be nice to him, did not disguise her occasional annoyance at his behavior, and yet she obviously preferred having him around at times. He assumed she associated with him because she thought he was useful to know.
Once, while discussing relations between a married couple, she said the situation would be tolerable unless the husband wasn't taking care of business. It took a moment for him to realize what she meant by this. She was saying that the husband was not fucking his wife enough, or well enough. She had said this without inflection. It startled him that she could think of sex as a business to be taken care of, and refer to it in the sort of dismissive, phlegmatic tones a plumber might use in describing a leaky faucet. It served to remind him that they had much less in common than he had supposed.
He went to her apartment one evening to study with her, and they ended up spending the night on her couch, talking and sleeping. The next day in class, she asked him why he hadn't tried anything. Caught off guard by the question, he was able to respond, with some hesitation, that he was shy. He had never admitted such a thing before. She said she understood. He changed the subject.
* * *
A week later, they spent a Sunday together and then went to her apartment to spend the night. When they arrived, he sat in a straight-backed chair in the middle of her living room. He didn't know what to do when they came into the room, and sitting in the chair seemed like the safest choice available to him. It would at least relieve him of the burden of making any more choices about where to stand, or whether to approach her. He was becoming frightened. What had been, for most of the day, some uncertainty about how things were going to go, had very quickly evolved into an avalanche of anxiety. In other situations he'd been in with women, there was always enough ambiguity attached to the circumstances to allow him to deflect any tension towards small talk. But here, he was certainly going to be expected to touch her face with his own. There was no passage through this circumstance that was not traumatic. He was simply scared to death. He could not even have described what it was that frightened him so much, other than that he would be exposed as a fraud for ever pretending not to be afraid.
She came into the room and looked at him without betraying a sense of anything being out of place. She asked him, in a voice that a secretary might use, whether he had brought contraceptives with him. He said no. She said she was going to put on her diaphragm, and left the room. He sat, frozen to the chair. Eventually she came back into the room wearing a bathrobe and sat on his knee.
He looked down at the floor. He couldn't look at her; he was having trouble controlling the muscles in his face, and he knew she would see this as soon as he turned towards her. She would know exactly what he was thinking. Not just the thoughts he would intend to share, but even his private thoughts; the ones he was having right then and would never want revealed. He would lose control over his presentation of himself, and become completely transparent. She would know immediately how scared he was, how this mindless, implacable fear was enveloping him. There would be no explaining. There would be no time or opportunity or point. It would already have been made plain what he was. He wouldn't be able to tell her about his feelings, rationalizing and justifying himself and putting things in a favorable light, as if his cowardice could be an interesting topic for conversation. She would see his fear for herself, written all over his face. She would realize at once what a phony he was, nothing at all like the detached, normal, rational grown man he was pretending to be. Anything would be better than that. So he kept looking at the floor.
She was sitting on his leg, so he couldn't go anywhere. She waited patiently, and didn't say anything. Thirty seconds ticked by. The sense of awkwardness in his not looking at her became acute. By now he could feel himself breathing, his mind was racing but to no effect, just thoughts stumbling over themselves. He couldn't think of a thing to say, and in any case trying to speak to her while looking at the floor would only make things worse. It was as if he was slowly being pushed off a cliff. Every choice was unbearable. There was to be no escape from this, from being so cruelly exposed. She still wouldn't say anything; by now she must already know, it must be so obvious, if only he hadn't come here at least she wouldn't know. All this trouble to get to this point, years trying to climb out of the cave he lived in, only to be seen through by some pitiless woman who would of course demand first of all some demonstration of his courage when in fact there was none. It was over. There was nothing left to be done that would make any difference. Slowly, almost as if being forced against his will, he turned his head and looked up at her.
