Of all things, the friendship and courtship of The Professor and Kendra Keane began with a novelty pin affixed to the heavy winter coat Kendra wore to the soup kitchen on the night they met. The Professor had tried to find an empty table, but with the room packed, he sat across the table from Kendra in the first empty seat he could find.Even though she appeared to be seconds away from completely breaking down into tears, The Professor did not feel a great desire to comfort the woman. It wasn’t really in his nature. Even if deep within his very guarded personality he did feel sorry for this woman, he wondered what difference his sympathy would make.
The Professor resumed eating his hot soup while occasionally looking over at the woman, making sure that she wasn’t going to lose it. He noticed that her puffy winter coat had a series of pins on them. Some were campaign slogans or had small symbols on them, but there was one that stuck out. A small white button was adorned with the nude backside of a cartoon character and read Life is short. Party Naked. The Professor chuckled when he read it.
“Life is short, party naked,” said The Professor, taking another sip of soup before speaking again. “Well, the mood in here isn’t really that festive, and it’s much too cold for going around naked.”
With that, Kendra slowly looked up from her desperate staring into the cooled bowl of soup below her. It almost looked like she had to hoist her head up with a crane, it seemed so heavy.
“Yeah,” she said with a heavy, sorrowful tone, “And life isn’t really that short.”
The Professor offered her a miniature chuckle and offered the closest thing to a smile that he had given off in a long time. Across the table, he noticed a small smirk escape through the side of her chapped lips.
“’Carter/Mondale ’80,’ a peace symbol, ‘No Blood For Oil.’ Now tell me, why do you have a ‘naked party’ button on the same jacket as those other ones?” It was a seemingly innocent question, but by the time Kendra conjured up the answer, a wave of memory and regret washed over her face, buckling her head, which once again hung down towards her soup.
She let out a melancholy sigh. “It was a gift from one of my students.”
Only a few years before meeting The Professor on that dreary late-winter’s eve, Kendra Keane had been Professor Keane, academic advisor and the chair of the Department of Race and Gender Studies at the State University of Vermont in Verciel. Although a few other professors taught classes within the department, Kendra was the heart and soul of the program. She had grown up in suburban Boston and went to Harvard where she wrote her thesis on African-American female identity in the 1980s.
Her essays were published in a few national magazines and helped to establish her as a respected voice within the academic community. Her articles helped her land a job teaching a class on Race and Gender at Verciel, and over the course of several years, she built interest and support for an accredited major based on her classes. By the mid-1990s, Kendra’s courses and classes had put Verciel State on the map. A successful educator and somewhat successful author with a nice house in the quiet college town, Kendra Keane was the personification of the American dream. What she never could have possibly dreamed was that everything would change the day she met Ben Kingston.
Kingston was the University President’s son, a fact that made her future relationship with The Professor all the more ironic. A child of interracial parents, Ben had read a number of Kendra’s articles while doing his undergraduate studies at Brown. He elected to go back to the college town where he grew up, just so that he could attend graduate school with Kendra.
She met Ben at a dinner with his father the night before the start of a new fall semester. In the beginning, Kendra found him charming and very intelligent, facts that did not surprise her after hearing about his accolades from his father. Ben had taken a year and a half off in-between high school and college and went on an expedition around the world before coming back to the states and beginning his studies at Brown. At the time they met, he was a very mature 26 while and Kendra was still quite beautiful, even at age 46. There were no sparks, no cheap flirting, no sly innuendos. They were simply teacher and student.
How it ended up developing into something more than that was still a mystery to her, she told The Professor. Of all things, she said it evolved out of a great mutual respect they had for each other. Ben had quoted Kendra rigorously in his bachelor’s thesis at Brown, and although he could have gone to graduate school anywhere, he purposely chose to come back to Verciel because of the famous Professor Kendra Keane.
On the other side of the podium, Kendra had become fond of Ben’s discussions and essays in her classes. When topics were brought up in her classes, Ben was always the first person with his hand raised, and even when the two disagreed, he offered informed and confident counterpoints. That, Kendra admitted, was what initially caused some of the attraction. Teachers’ pets were at the top of Kendra’s pet peeves, and the last thing she wanted from any of her students was her own rhetoric regurgitated back to her. She often gave higher marks to papers that argued against a topic rather than with it. In Ben she saw the man she had always been looking for. She was always looking for a man who shared her beliefs and interests, yet always kept an independent and righteous mind. She had always looked for confidence, rather than insecurity, especially when it came to her staunch feminist viewpoints. She had been attracted to both black men and white men, and Ben shared none of the traits that repulsed her about both. He was perfect. He was just too young. And after all, she thought, why would he be interested in an older woman like her anyway?
Kendra was way too busy to be burdened by the philosophical crisis regarding the feelings she had for Ben. She taught nine different classes, had more than 300 students and was working on a third book that was never published; she had no time to worry about the President’s son. She had been working on that third book for close to three years. The previous two had helped her gain respect within her field, but neither of them had sold well, and she was banking on the third one to finally raise her up out of debt. Her house in Verciel was gorgeous, but the university owned it, and they had sole discretion over who lived there. There was also the issue of a decade-old student loan bill that had been depleted, but not deleted.
The summertime brought peace, quiet, warm days and cool nights to the mountains of Vermont. What it did not bring was a substantial income. Kendra taught a few intensive summer courses, traveled and gave a few lectures, but she made the bulk of her state university salary from September to May. To offset some of her expenses, Kendra usually rented out the ground floor of her house to one or two quiet students who were summering in Verciel and wanted a better option than living on-campus. When she put up flyers like she did every May, she was surprised to receive a call from Ben Kingston.
He had been staying at the University President’s mansion in the hills on the outskirts of town, but he had grown frustrated with staying with his parents and had decided to live somewhere else in town while he completed his Masters. Kendra was delighted to have Ben as her summer houseguest. She needed the extra money to help her through the summer, and the idea of having such a pleasant young man like Ben living there seemed like a decent idea. After all, there was nothing going on between them.
For the first month of the summer, Kendra and Ben were like ships passing in the night. Ben tended bar down at a sud shack down in the valley and slept in late after Kendra had gone to work. Kendra got lonely in the summer. She missed her students and the overall human contact. She worked well with her colleagues, but their friendship didn’t extend further than the faculty parking lot. After a few weeks, she found herself listening for him to close the back door to the ground floor apartment every night around 3:30 when he had returned from the bar. Many times, she felt like going downstairs and talking with him for a while, just to give him some company.
Ben had been dating an actress named Scarlet in Providence, and every now and then, Kendra would hear a telephone conversation begin to deteriorate from the other side of the downstairs wall. Ben had passed up a number of opportunities to come up to Verciel and study in Kendra’s program. One of those opportunities included the opportunity to spend more time with his college sweetheart. By the fourth of July, Ben was working late into the night and his long telephone conversations gradually diminished into a somber silence.
On Independence Day, Ben was sitting in an armchair in Kendra’s backyard. Her backyard was on a hillside, and through a clearing of trees, one could barely spot the stands of the minor league baseball stadium where the fire department was setting off some fireworks. Kendra was going to go down to the stadium herself and watch the game, but for a number of reasons—primarily a great sense of boredom and longing for some company—she decided to go out into the backyard and spend some time with her tenant.
Ben’s mopey demeanor suddenly brightened when he saw Kendra emerge from the porch with two glasses and a chilled bottle of wine.
“You know, I always forget that I have this pretty view of downtown from the house up here,” she said and handed Ben a glass. “And I don’t want to deal with all those drunken kids driving down to the field tonight.”
Ben laughed and agreed as she poured him a drink. They started talking about the boring summer that had yet to materialize into anything more than humid mornings, afternoon clouds and a dreary evening rainstorm. The rain had held off that night, and the fog had lifted from the valley to the point that every streetlight glowed in a long, gridlocked pattern.
Kendra complained about her book, which had hit a stubborn roadblock. Ben complained about his ex-girlfriend, who was still a junior at Brown. Perhaps she was too young for him, he mused. It was the first time that Kendra even suspected that Ben was making some kind of pass at her.
The night drifted on as the sounds of the pep band blew up through the mountains, the bass drums and trombones were skewed by pockets of humidity, falling out of sync as the sound ricocheted off every building in town. The mosquitoes had feasted on Kendra and Ben before they too began to get drunk off their wine-tainted blood. They laughed about Ben’s dad and what he was like to grow up with. They exchanged sad stories about unrequited love and opportunities past. Kendra talked about the subject of her new book, which fascinated Ben and boosted Kendra’s ego, as she began to think that maybe this time she could write a best seller.
Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was their intense loneliness, maybe it was the cool breeze that blew the smell of gunpowder into her backyard or maybe it was the multi-colored explosions that lit up the valley and illuminated the green hills against the black night sky, but neither of them knew how it happened, just that it had happened and it was good. She had taken her eyes off the fireworks for a second and realized that Ben was staring at her instead of the display. She froze as their eyes met. She felt as indecisive and nervous as she had been the first time she kissed a boy in high school. As he put down his empty glass and slowly moved in to kiss her, a wave of emotions shot through her like the explosions in the sky down below. It felt so wrong, and so dirty to kiss one of her students, something she swore she would never do and always admonished. But she felt so unbelievably comfortable with Ben. He had always stuck out in her classes. He was 20 years her junior, but she had always secretly been attracted to the mature and confident way he presented himself. She knew it was wrong, but after her shock wore off, she kissed him back even harder. This was so good, but it was so bad. To make matters worse, he wasn’t just any student; he was the son of the President of the University. Maybe her life felt so drab and so colorless that she needed to do this incredibly reckless, incredibly irresponsible, incredibly spontaneous action in order to set off a spark in her life. Ben sure set a spark off alright. It burned brighter and hotter than any good thing that had ever happened in Kendra’s life.
She woke up the next morning to find Ben still asleep in her bed. It was a mistake, she knew that much. She quickly wrapped herself in the top sheet and walked bashfully over to her wardrobe to put on some clothes. When she closed the door and emerged somewhat descent, she found Ben checking her out from underneath her covers. While Kendra kept asking herself what the hell she was thinking, she saw Ben sporting playful midmorning smile that hinted that he was not the slightest bit ashamed of spending a night with the older woman.
“Good morning,” he said politely. Kendra paused a moment to gather herself. Wine or no wine, fireworks or no fireworks, great sex or no great sex, she had simply enjoyed spending time with the young man. She had not been with a man in close to three years and the harder she had worked; the less she had time to spend with her friends. She couldn’t continue this kind of relationship, but she couldn’t push Ben away. She was coming to the sad realization that she needed him.
“Would you like some breakfast?” asked a shy Kendra.
At breakfast Kendra uncomfortably addressed the subject of the previous night while Ben calmly and humbly agreed that the evening had been pleasant. Kendra tried to explain to Ben that their relationship had crossed into a dangerous territory, one that she was unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable with. Ben simply repeated his assertion that the night had been splendid and gave off the distinct impression that unlike Kendra, he didn’t see anything wrong with what had happened. Without resolution they finished breakfast, returned to their separate living quarters and resumed their lives.
The summer had finally arrived in full splendor and Kendra was in a thick writer’s block. Some nights she would stay up late in the evening until she heard Ben’s Explorer pull into the driveway. She cautiously went downstairs to knock on his door. She wanted to discuss the subject of her new book and about the impasse that she had come to. What she really wanted was to be held. Ben, of course, was always willing to reciprocate.
Following an evening spent together, Kendra rushed through her writers’ block like a mack truck plowing through a rusty gate. She could write for eight straight hours after spending an evening with Ben. She would often recite pages to him in bed, mystifying the young man with the fiercest theories and analysis that she had ever written before. By late August, the manuscript was practically finished. Had it not been for her post-orgasmic output, it might have taken her until Christmastime to finish the book. Without Ben, the book would have lacked the passion and spark that prevented her previous publications from becoming sensations.
The summer always ended in the mountains a little earlier than everywhere else. The cool winds of autumn began to blow into Verciel in late August, and with them came Kendra’s sad realization that her steamy romance with Ben would ultimately have to be cooled due to the upcoming semester.
She had no idea how Ben would take her autumnal rejection. It was one thing for her to be sleeping with one of her tenants. He had opted not to pay her rent for the month of August, instead, buying her a lovely necklace. But once school started, Kendra could not teach a student who might feel entitled to special privileges. He knew he had to move, but he did not believe that he had to pack their romance into a box as well.
Kendra made her big speech to him on the night before the new semester, one year to the date after she had first met this young man at her employer’s house for a family dinner. Nobody—not even Kendra or Ben’s closest friends, family or co-workers—knew about the romance. Ben took it exceptionally hard. He had expected that things would continue to develop for the two of them. He felt that there was a unique and special connection that the two shared. He was not prepared to give up without a fight, but he did so out of his respect for Kendra, and cleaned the final things out of his rented room before moving across town into a small one bedroom in the University Common. The only items he left behind were a few novelty pins that he had taken off his hoodie before a wash and then forgotten about.
Once the active class participant, Ben had become a silent statue in the rear of Kendra’s classroom. When they met eyes, he slid his focus down to his notebook, where it often seemed he was writing notes that did not pertain to the class at all. When Kendra invited him to come out and sit in on a lecture, he declined or simply stood her up. His papers—once masterful opinions that presented bold arguments backed up with research and reason—had reverted into the regurgitated jargon that Kendra loathed to read from her students.
Matters went from bad to worse in early November when Ben walked into Kendra’s class an hour late. It was his fifth absence in 15 classes. Other students were allotted only three unexcused absences before their grade was automatically turned into an F. When Kendra asked Ben to at least turn in an assignment due on that particular day, he said that he had not finished it.
In a rare display of anger, Professor Keane—as she was known professionally—lashed out at the student, telling him that his chronic lateness and failure to turn in work on time was unacceptable, and she would be forced to fail him for the semester. Needless to say, Ben was livid. He leapt up out of his chair and started calling Kendra’s performance unacceptable. The classroom, which always had a laid-back and mellow atmosphere, suddenly turned incredibly tense as Ben lit into Kendra. She had dealt with rude students before, but she suddenly felt a great sense of fear grip her. If Ben got too riled up, he might spill the beans about their relationship.
She changed her approach, “Ben, please just have a seat and we’ll talk about this after class, okay?” she said trying to contain the blaze before it got out of hand. But as an evil grin emerged across Ben’s face, she knew immediately that she was caught in the firestorm.
“Yeah, that’s just what you’d like, huh,” said a maniacal Ben, “Is that what you do, just lure these young boys into your bed and then fuck them over? Huh!”
“How dare you!” shot back Kendra. She tried to pass off the insult as bogus, but it was obvious from her mannerisms that she was more embarrassed and humiliated than angered and insulted.
“I can’t believe I wasted my whole summer with you… and to think that I thought I was in love with you!” he shouted as he picked up his sweater and speed walked to the door, slamming it on his way out.
Kendra stood in the center of the lecture hall, frozen and petrified. She could hear the whispers from her graduate degree candidates, but she knew that those whispers would only grow louder in chorus. One way or another, her career at Verciel State as she knew it was in jeopardy.
Verciel State was a small school and word traveled fast. Within a week of Ben’s tirade in the middle of Kendra’s classroom, the university launched an inquiry into the relationship between Kendra and one of her students. Kendra, who was tenured and was very well respected both at Verciel and elsewhere, was honest with the university’s Academic Committee and told them about the relationship between her and Ben. She admitted her guilt and called the affair a mistake as well as an isolated incident that had not happened before and would not happen again.
Originally, Kendra was forced into taking a semester-long, paid sabbatical. She was told that upon her return, she would resume her duties as chair of her department. The case was never supposed to become a national issue, but a student newspaper found out about the story through a source, and when they published a report, the story was blown out of proportion by a hungry news media obsessed with cases regarding teachers having affairs with students.
All of a sudden, Kendra Keane and her reputation were being smeared on national television shows as the media tried and convicted her in the court of public opinion. The story only lasted a week, but it killed a lifetime of work. Had the story never gone public, Kendra would have been able to come back to Verciel State and resume her teaching. Instead, she returned after her spring sabbatical and a summer off to find that her position as chair had been stripped away from her, and her courseload was cut in half. Her salary now reflected that of a low-level professor, and she was unable to afford the gorgeous house provided for her by the university. She was tenured, but they were going to try their hardest to make her leave.
After the incident, Kendra looked around for other work, but found that her reputation was irrevocably smeared by her infamy with Ben. She stayed at Verciel for another year and a half until Ben—who had since become a Professor at Verciel— published a new book that had completely ripped-off Kendra’s long delayed third manuscript. Ben’s thesis had copied entire chapters of Kendra’s work verbatim. To make matters worse, the Verciel University Press had published the book, and the book was going to be the cornerstone of a revamped Race and Gender Studies Department chaired by the newly ordained Dr. Ben Kingston.
Kendra quit her job in protest and took what was left of her life savings and sued Ben Kingston and the State University for plagiarizing her third book. With no evidence other than a few old sheets of white paper and a computer file that could have been altered anywhere, Kendra lost at trial when the judge claimed that she did not meet the burden of proof.
She ended up in the Tri-Towns living with a sister in a run-down roach motel on one of the poorest blocks in the city. She went to the soup kitchens because it was free and because her soul had been sucked so dry that she couldn’t feel any shame.
She met The Professor on that cold night in February and followed him back to Morgenthau with Grover. Morgenthau was a step down from her sister’s place, but it wasn’t such a big step. She would never gone to Morgenthau had it not been for the hospitality offered to her by Grover and the old man.
Her life had lacked meaning since Ben had robbed her of everything that she had in her life. When she saw the squalor of the people living at the abandoned campus, and realized all of the terrible things that its residents were subjected to by Nolan, Simeon and their father, she began a new quest.
The squat was illegal, and she was determined to bring the so-called landlords to justice. The drugs were destroying the minds and bodies of some of our friends, and she was determined to get them clean. The campus was overrun with dejection, desperation and destitution, and she was determined to show us that there was a way out and a brighter day ahead. She had lost everything, and came to us with nothing but her big heart and big dreams, hoping that by saving us, she might possibly redeem herself.
She died trying to show us how to live. Despite her undying faith in us, I don’t even think she could have imagined how her dreams would eventually come to fruition.
No comments:
Post a Comment