Extra Credit at Walden Pond

a course I didn't know I was enrolled in

This is a work of fiction drawn from real events.

Names and some identifying details have been changed.

OFFICE HOURS

He started asking me to stay after class sometime in October. It wasn’t really that strange to me, since he led with compliments about my art and possible mentoring. Adam was one of my professors at film school, he was in his late 30’s, and I remember thinking that was really young to be a professor. The way he recognized my work, recommend me books and films I had never heard of, and offered his personal number because he was starting to hate the sound of his email notification. I remember the first time he gently pulled me aside, away from all the other students packing up their canvas bags full of random film school bullshit. I was thinking to myself “fuck, I must’ve been zoning out too long in class, he is going to ask me about that”. I didn’t know what dissociation was back then, and I had been experiencing a flare up while adjusting to living in a new place and being a student of art in general. When it was the opposite, and he was asking me to come discuss some of my work further in his office, I was fucking astonished when it was good feedback. The imposter syndrome was at an all-time high then, like it is for many young artists trying to figure out where they fit in. His office smelled like paper and books, and nag champa incense. This man was an intellectual on paper with his thick-rimmed glasses and coffee-stained papers, but from his love of Henry Thoreau and outdoorsmen fools journey types like Chris McCandless, I knew that he had a little bit of hippie in him too. The combo was enough to make me have a crush on him almost immediately, but he was married and I was raised catholic, so my mind never even went there until it did. Anyway, there were shelves of new-to-me books I wanted to peek at, and papers all over his desk, so it really felt like serious work happened there. I was sickeningly naïve and easily impressed, I suppose. Adam would read my film scripts back to me slowly, like they weren’t shitty rough drafts, as if they deserved to me heard out loud. I was nineteen and believed that talent could be detected by older men who liked the same things as me. I would always leave his office feeling less of an imposter, and more like someone had finally noticed and cosigned the version of me that I believed existed.

The weeks went by, turned into months, and I found myself curating the way my stories were written so that he would like them. Cringe and desperate. Yes. But this was the era of liking older men in the way the girls like me were taught to: through music and movies and the promise of being seen. I was Lana Del Rey-ing a little too close to the sun with this. He was married, of course, but that detail sat somewhere very distant at the time, just background noise in one of the films he was telling me about. Soon, meetings about the work I was doing in his class turned into film and book recommendations, which turned into him demanding that I watch and read these recommendations because they reminded him of me. Excuse me, your favorite art makes you think of me? It was then that I knew deep down the lines of this relationship were getting significantly blurred. I did not give a single shit. I can admit that. I kept it pushing.

Lolita (1997)

THE FIRST INVITATION

After months of film and literature recommendations, nights of me going down French new wave rabbit holes, and reading Camus + Kafka for fun, things took a turn. Looking back now, I was definitely doing assignments outside of his syllabus meant only for me, what a fucking teacher’s pet. I watched what he recommended, carried around his book recommendations like talismans of proof that I was worth investing in. One day, when mansplaining the entirety of Henry Thoreau’s life and philosophy, he asked if I had ever heard of or been to Walden Pond. I told him I had heard of it vaguely while studying Thoreau in high school but had never been myself. He looked around cooly, his feet up on the desk like he sometimes did and said “It’s not that far of a drive actually.” Then, just truly fucking casually, he mentioned “Maybe we could go sometime”, just like it was another film or book recommendation. My stomach quickly fell into my ass and I gripped the chair as if to stable myself and my shaking legs. I had to hide my excitement, so I just nodded my head and said, “That would be fun!” like the nineteen-year-old child I was. I did not think of this as strange at the time, it felt like I was special. I was being offered extra credit and extra attention by a man that I looked up to, and just so happened to yearn for between the legs sometimes. I was being offered a course that these other film schoolgirls were not getting; a class that nobody else knew existed. It felt good to have a secret like that, and I’m still unpacking why to this day.

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Image found on tumblr.

Bradley Cooper reading Lolita to Suki Waterhouse in the park.

WALDEN

The first time we went camping at Walden Pond, I told myself it was educational. It was late autumn, the light spilling everywhere in the early morning. Adam picked me up from my college apartment that I shared with 8 other people at 7:30am. The drive to Walden felt like crossing into a different version of my life, and in a way in was. I remember noticing the trees first: taller than anything near campus, darker, quieter. I was buzzing with anticipation. He told me to open up the glove box, there was something in there for me to look at. It was an old and annotated copy of Walden, his I’m assuming, the spine all withered like his hands had eroded it lovingly. This was somehow part of the fabric of the weekend, part of my equipment. We drove in silence the rest of the way, it wasn’t uncomfortable, I was just being a good girl and reading through the weekend material. I remember the first glimpse of water, the smell of the air. It smelled like pine and damp earth, like a late autumn love song that I was ready to play on repeat all weekend. Part of me wondered what he told his wife to be away for two days, and part of me only thought that once and never visited it in my mind again. He pulled two tents out of his car and said “Do you need help with yours?” I nodded and he proceeded to set mine up first, and then I tossed my blankets and pillows and books that he recommended over the year in there safely. I was admiring the scenery, trying to feel like Thoreau had, when I noticed him making the fire. He had rolled up the sleeves on his Forrest-green button up shirt and was breaking kindling up, and I was watching in awe. I think he knew I was watching him, because he chuckled and asked if I wanted to build the fire with him, and help prepare the food. I snapped out of it and began obediently following his instructions, stopping every once and a while to admire the scenery.

NIGHTFALL

The fire had already burned down to a smaller version of itself by the time he opened the book again. The campsite felt smaller than it had in daylight. Everything had rearranged itself into shadows that looked closer than they were. It was just him and I in that contained space, but I know the trees were listening to us. Somewhere behind the trees the water was still in the night, opposite of my heart going pitter-patter harder and faster. He sat on a big rock across from me, knees angled toward the fire. The pages of Walden and other books caught light in small flashes, deciding when and what they wanted to reveal. “Listen to this,” he said, not really asking. Then he read slowly, deliberately as if he was letting each word settle in the space between us. At first, it felt like school in a way that made sense, kind of comforting almost. I was doing something smart and correct by just being there, attentive and listening. Eager and wiling. He started reading Pale Fire by Nabokov, one of my now favorite novels, and the transition felt so natural. He was like a DJ of literature. The way he read to me felt like one mind stepping into another and walking together. I loved it. I think by the second hour it started to feel less like school and literature and more like orbiting someone else’s interior world, and them letting me. Welcoming me. I remember thinking briefly, I didn’t know where the nearest road was, and I wasn’t even panicked. Just kind of calculating a distance. He read a passage and would laugh or smile here and there about something only he had access too. The laughs didn’t include me, even though I was sitting right there, desperate to be included. The fire shrank more. I became aware of getting cold, the weight of my own presence. The night had no witnesses except us to name whatever the fuck was happening here. That was the first time the thought arrived clearly, without emotion attached: this is strange. Then he picked up the guitar. There was no announcement, not even a shift in tone to prepare for it. The first chords of a Smashing Pumpkins song that I was familiar with, the sound wasn’t necessarily being rejected by Walden, but it didn’t feel right either. So he played on, and the sound layered over the crackling of the disappearing fire; over the distance between two people who had run out of structured roles for the evening. I remember watching his hands instead of his face, and being painfully aware of what my own face was doing. When he finally stopped playing, there was a pause that lasted longer than necessary. Neither of us knew who was supposed to re-enter the language first.

We stood up at the same awkward time. The campsite felt even fucking smaller now? Was I on peyote? Just two tents, a dying fire, and the space between and student and teacher that suddenly felt more defined than anything else on the planet. He walked me to my tent. I said Goodnight, he hugged me. It wasn’t too dramatic, but it lasted too long. More than a fraction, less than an hour. It was long enough for my body to register time differently than my mind did. It was long enough that I became aware that I didn’t have a name or category for it yet. And then he let go, but not immediately, there was a small delay. A held breath, and a long gentle look at me up and down. “Goodnight, Kay.” He said, like we were ending a normal evening. I nodded, he stepped back. I zipped the tent shut and let out a sigh. Had I been holding my breath this entire time?

Inside, everything was suddenly painfully normal. Nylon walls, my old ass sleeping bag and extra blankets, the muffled presence of a grown man a few feet away in his own tent. The strange realization that simplicity can still contain that you don’t know how to name yet. I think that was the moment the story changed categories in my mind, it had stopped being only beautiful.

Henry Thoreau’s Walden Pond cabin.

THE SLOW BLURN (yes, blurn)

After the camping trip, I resumed my daily routine, and nothing changed in a way that I could pinpoint. That was the thing. Back in class, everything returned to its institutional shape: fluorescent lights, assigned reading, critique language, and never forgetting to wear his wedding ring. No more magic, no more recommendations that I actually appreciated, just the clean structure of academic language and attention. He spoke to me in the same way he spoke to everyone else. My name appeared in his head with no weight on it now. Or so I thought. He began slowly dropping breadcrumbs of care and interest here and there. An extra-long and detailed comment on a draft of mine. Emails that felt slightly more personal, albeit I was dissecting the language in them like fucking Nancy Drew. He would make eye contact with me while talking about something he knew I was interested in and linger a bit longer before moving on. This was nothing I could grab onto, nothing of substance, and just enough to keep me guessing. The more I mulled this over in my head, the more I convinced myself that I invented the entire thing. I started waiting and hoping for those micro-moments. Pathetic.

Then came the theater. He had a membership to a small but cool theater space that showed lots of interesting and old films in uneven schedules. This place was very exclusive to be a member of, but I had actually been there before with some of my film bro friends who somehow had a membership they all passed around between them. He mentioned it casually once in a text to me, this was when he had made the switch from email again and given me more hope. We went to a 35mm screenings together after that. At least two a month for the rest of the semester. These were NOT dates, they were not described that way. It was just merely overlapping presence in dark rooms where the world was reduced to flicker and grain and other people’s stories. There was some comfort in sitting in silence beside someone who had once been a figure of authority, but now those lines were so blurry. A collapsing of roles that felt like intimacy but didn’t announce itself as such.

I remember the night. It was a screening of Godard’s Alphaville, and he was walking me to my car afterwards. The air between us shifted into something I didn’t know how to navigate, At the car, we stopped in the place where endings usually happen, I was fumbling with my keys. He grabbed my hands in his, looked down at me, and kissed me. This rearranged everything. This couldn’t be perceived as accidental, and maybe I wasn’t crazy for thinking he loved me too. Afterwards, I told myself it meant nothing. Then, I told myself it meant everything. I was a fucking mess for weeks, and one of my favorite French new wave films was ruined for me. I quickly just stopped telling myself anything at all about it, but I noticed just as quick that I wasn’t being invited to the theater anymore. In fact, he wasn’t texting me at all. I was waiting with baited breath for his next book recommendation, just fucking waiting inside the absence and it had no shape that I could recognize.

I stopped turning things in on time in all of my classes. My attention was fractured in big ways, and in small untraceable ways. It wasn’t a clean heartbreak; it was murky waters.

Alphaville movie poster.

RECKONING

What I understand about this whole situation now is not a mystery, it’s clear to me as a 33-year-old woman. This was a strange power imbalance moving at a slow enough molasses pace to look like intimacy to me. The “mentorship” became so blurred, it actually never had defined edges. I think that because this thing between us was never named clearly, it never had to be questioned clearly either.

I see him now as someone who understood how to be significant in my life, without appearing to take up any space in it. He knew how to offer validation that felt so good to me, it felt like someone discovering my abilities. And of course, now I see myself a with more tenderness. I was not confused in the way that I believed I was. I was merely responding to attention, meaning, and proximity the only way I knew how to at the time: through story, through film, through aesthetics. The idea that being seen by someone so smart could be the same thing as feeling safe.

If I could speak to that 19-year-old version of myself now I would not tell her she was foolish. I would tell her that admiration isn’t neutral or ok when it is structured by authority. That kind of attention is not the same thing as genuine care, it’s actually quite the opposite. It felt like he was choosing me, but really, he was just narrowing my choices. I would also tell her that not every door that opens up to her is meant to be walked through. And I would also tell her, that we can watch Alphaville and enjoy it now.

Film still from Alphaville, (1965). Jean-Luc Godard.

Thanks for reading my real-life events, rearranged.

This is my first personal essay. be gentle. or don’t.