A Sensual Education 7 comments

By Caroline Langston

Twenty-five years ago this spring, I cut a deal with Mr. X, an English teacher at my boarding school to clean his campus apartment once a week for five dollars an hour.

This was something of a stunt on my part: I needed the money; I had a mild crush on him. In a boarding school where faculty members’ personalities and quirks were the subjects of everyday public gossip—he was a poet, divorced from another teacher at the school who’d remarried still another faculty member—cleaning his house posed a thrilling opportunity to trespass a private sphere of adult life beyond the campus.

I was sixteen. He was forty. This is not that story.

Every Tuesday after my eight o’clock class was over, I walked in the early morning sunlight haze across the school’s green Georgian quadrangles, feeling like I was on a special secret mission. It was a glorious New England spring: bumblebees buzzing over fragrant lilac bushes just about to burst.

I turned past the vast red brick Commons building, the dining hall, whose giant chandeliers blazed day and night back in those environmentally un-conscious days. Then a couple blocks down a street that looked like it was off-campus, but on which most of the houses were owned by the school.

He lived on the second floor of a sagging old triple decker whose other apartments were inhabited by assorted Townies—we really called them that—who worked at Commons. I mounted the creaking stairs, opened the door (he never locked the door), and went inside.

How can I describe the feeling I had as I closed the door behind me, the dusty space of his airy rooms billowing around me? It was as though I could finally breathe, and, in a school where the main, relentless goal was vague and undefined “success,” it was as though my life was invested with a list of small, far more important intentions. The empty apartment fell around my rounded shoulders like a cloak.

I had a routine: Through the never-used front room with its wall of bookcases (slim volumes of poetry with their spare Seventies paperback covers), down the hall, and to the kitchen to turn the radio on, to a doo-wop AM station from working-class Lowell. (It was my way of rebelling against my fellow students’ preoccupation with the Grateful Dead.)

Then—you’re not surprised, I’m sure—to his room to make the bed. It was the quintessential stereotype of a divorced-guy’s bed: queen mattresses on the floor, black sheets, a black quilt cast aside and tangled into a whorl. I yanked off the old sheets and cast them into the laundry basket in a ball, then carefully unfolded the clean set he’d left me and put them on, kneeling on the bare wood floor to tuck them in.

I took the black quilt in both hands and aired it out by shaking it to the ceiling, then letting it fall perfectly down over the mattress. The air sparkled with dust motes; I’d attack those later. I neatened the covers and finished by carefully placing the pillows side-by-side.

Almost always, he’d left a pair of pants in a pile on the floor, and I got to conduct the careful archeology of picking them up, shaking them out and folding them if they were still clean enough, casting them into the laundry if they weren’t. To touch them—let’s face it, I was touching the pants that had been on this man’s body—seemed both amusing and wondrous. And as much as I tittered about it later with my friends Naomi and Hella, I felt reverent about it as well.

After the bedroom I went to the kitchen, made a cup of tea for myself, straightened up the scattered copies of The New York Times and The Boston Globe from the breakfast table, then set to work on the dishes, plunging them into hot running water and arraying them along the lip of the sink. Then vacuuming, dusting, and at last the bathroom, the only part that creeped me out a bit, but one made better by kneeling over the bathtub and scrubbing hard while the hot, hot water ran down the porcelain. There was a lone, extravagant bottle of 4711 cologne on the shelf, and more than once I picked it up and opened its decanter top, breathing deeply.

Only once do I remember Mr. X being present while I was conducting all these activities, watching me bemused as I ran through my chores. He mentioned books of poetry to me. He’d played football at Bucknell. He adored his daughter, who at the time was ten, and from him I picked up a notion of how good fathers were supposed to parent their children. In a nod to the doo-wop music playing on the kitchen radio, he mentioned that he’d made out with girls in high school in the back of the movie theater during intermission as the Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” played over the sound system.

The whole thing was incredibly sexy, and yet also completely honorable. We are living in a spring in which the horrific misdeeds of adults against children is an ever-present staple of the news. However retrograde it sounds, I feel grateful for all those hours in Mr. X’s apartment—a perfect medium for my development as a woman, as a sexual being, somewhere I finally realized that I could be precious and whole.