Nadia was twenty-two years old, three semesters out of her undergrad degree, and currently failing the one class she had been embarrassed to fail.
It was not the kind of failing she had done before — the dropping-a-semester failing, the staying-out-too-late failing, the falling-in-love-with-the-wrong-person failing she had done the year before and had spent all summer recovering from. It was the quietly-incompetent failing. The showing-up-to-every-lecture failing. The having-the-textbook-open failing. She could do the math when she could see the math. She could not do the math on a closed-book exam, in a quiet room, with a clock ticking, and she had failed the midterm by four points, and the four points were going to cost her the rest of the semester if she did not get help.
So she had emailed the professor.
Professor Chen was thirty-four and looked, in the photograph on the department website, like a man who had been told to smile for the camera and had complied by smiling exactly the amount that compliance required. His office hours were Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. His office was on the third floor of the math building, which had been built in the 1970s and which smelled, in August, of old carpet and air conditioning that had been working too hard.
She knocked. He said come in.
He was not in the photograph in person. In person he was taller, thinner, and wore the sleeves of his shirt rolled up past the elbows. He had a small scar on his left wrist that she did not look at directly. He had a teacup on his desk, and the teacup had, written on it in sharpie, the words DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT INTEGRALS.
“You must be Nadia,” he said.
“I must be Nadia.”
“You’re failing my class.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“That’s the spirit. Sit down.”
She sat down. He looked at her for a long time, in a way she was not sure was professional, and then he opened his desk drawer and took out a yellow legal pad.
“Tell me what you understand,” he said, “and then tell me what you don’t understand, and then I will figure out which of the things you don’t understand are actually things you don’t understand and which of them are things you think you don’t understand but actually do.”
She came back the next Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that. And the Tuesday after that. Professor Chen was a patient teacher in the way that some people are patient because they have nothing else to be — not impatient, exactly, but unstirred. He explained the chain rule four times. He explained the chain rule a fifth time, slowly, while she wrote it down. He explained the chain rule a sixth time, with his finger on the page, his finger close to hers, his finger very close to hers.
On the fourth Tuesday he asked her if she wanted to come in on Fridays too. She said she did. On the fifth Tuesday he asked her if she had eaten lunch. She said she had not. He went to the faculty lounge and brought her back a sandwich, which was the first sandwich a professor had ever brought her in her life.
On the seventh Tuesday she made a small joke, and he laughed, and the laugh was the first time she had heard him laugh, and she thought, very specifically, I would like to hear that laugh again.
By the ninth Tuesday the tutoring had stopped being about calculus.
It was still about calculus. He was still explaining the chain rule and the quotient rule and the second derivative. She was still writing it down. But the explanations had started to take a shape that was not strictly academic. He explained the second derivative by saying, imagine you are driving a car, and the first derivative is your speed, and the second derivative is how fast your speed is changing, and you want to know how fast your speed is changing because you are about to brake. He said the word brake and she blushed. He noticed her blush. She noticed him noticing her blush.
“Am I making you uncomfortable,” he said.
“No.”
“Your face is doing something.”
“My face is doing calculus.”
“Your face is doing something I have not seen a face do in this office before.”
She looked at him. He looked at her. The teacup said DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT INTEGRALS and neither of them asked about integrals.
“Professor Chen,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Can I ask you something that is not about calculus.”
“You can.”
“Should I.”
“Probably not.”
“I want to ask you anyway.”
“Then you should ask me anyway.”
She did not ask him. She picked up her pencil and went back to the second derivative and he went back to the explanation and the explanation went on for another twenty minutes, and at the end of the twenty minutes he said, quietly, I am going to ask the registrar for a different tutor for you.
“What?”
“I am going to ask the registrar to assign you a different tutor.”
“Why.”
“Because I am your professor, and you are my student, and what is happening between us is not something I should be the person to teach you about.”
“What is happening between us.”
He looked at her. He looked at her for a long time.
“You tell me,” he said.
She looked at the legal pad. She looked at the teacup. She looked at his hands, which were folded in front of him, and which had, when he had been explaining the chain rule, been close to hers, and which had not been close to hers again since she had blushed.
“You have been making me feel like the only person in this room,” she said. “For nine Tuesdays. For nine Tuesdays you have been making me feel like the only person in this room, and you have been doing it on purpose, and I do not think you should be doing it on purpose.”
“No,” he said. “I should not.”
“Should you be doing it at all.”
“No. I should not be doing it at all.”
“Are you going to keep doing it.”
“I don’t know.”
“What would happen if you kept doing it.”
He didn’t answer. She didn’t ask again. She picked up her legal pad and put it in her bag and stood up to leave, and he said her name, and she stopped, and he said, the answer is yes I would keep doing it, and the answer is that is the reason I am telling you to ask for a different tutor, and the answer is that I have been a professor for nine years and I have never had this problem with a student before and I want you to know that I take it seriously.
“Okay,” she said.
“I will refer you to my colleague.”
“Okay.”
“You are welcome to refuse.”
She sat down again. She put her bag on the floor. She put her legal pad back on the desk.
“Don’t refer me,” she said.
“Nadia.”
“I am twenty-two years old. I am an adult. I am not your student in any way that is not on the registrar’s roster. I am a person who is failing calculus and who would like not to fail calculus and who has, in the last nine Tuesdays, learned more than she learned in the rest of the semester combined.”
“That isn’t —”
“That is exactly the point. You are a good teacher. You are also making me feel like the only person in this room. I am asking you to keep doing both.”
He looked at the teacup. He looked at the door. He looked at her.
“Same time next Tuesday,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And on Friday.”
“Yes.”
“And the Tuesday after that, we are going to have a conversation that is not about calculus.”
“Yes.”
“And the conversation is going to be the last conversation we have in this office.”
“Okay.”
“And the next conversation is going to happen somewhere else.”
She nodded. He nodded. The teacup said DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT INTEGRALS and neither of them asked about integrals, and the next Tuesday the conversation happened, and the conversation was the last conversation they had in the office, and the conversation after that happened somewhere else.
The somewhere else was a coffee shop three blocks from campus. It was a coffee shop where the tables were small and the chairs were uncomfortable and the music was always slightly too loud. She arrived first. He arrived two minutes later with the legal pad under his arm and the teacup — the DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT INTEGRALS teacup — in a paper bag.
“You brought the teacup,” she said.
“It is the only teacup I own.”
“You could have brought a different teacup.”
“I could have.”
She laughed. He laughed. The laugh was the laugh from the ninth Tuesday. She thought, I would like to hear that laugh again, and then she thought, I am going to hear that laugh again, and I am going to make him laugh, and I am going to sit in this coffee shop and I am going to make him laugh and he is going to make me blush and we are going to do both of those things on purpose.
“Nadia,” he said.
“Professor Chen.”
“You told me your name is Nadia. You didn’t tell me anything else.”
“I’m twenty-two. I failed my first midterm by four points. I have a cat named Sum. I cried at a Pixar movie last month. I have, in the last nine Tuesdays, spent more time thinking about you than I have spent thinking about calculus.”
He looked at the table. He looked at the teacup. He looked at her.
“My name is Daniel. I am thirty-four. I have been a professor for nine years. I have, in the last nine Tuesdays, spent more time thinking about you than I have spent thinking about my dissertation, which is the only thing I have spent more time on, in my entire life, than calculus.”
She reached across the small table. She put her hand on top of his hand. He turned his hand over. Their palms touched.
“I want to kiss you,” she said.
“I want you to kiss me.”
“Not here.”
“Not here.”
“Somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else.”
“Somewhere with a door.”
“Somewhere with a door.”
His apartment was a fifteen-minute walk. His apartment was on the second floor of a triple-decker, with a small kitchen and a green velvet couch and bookshelves on every wall, and a teacup collection on the highest shelf that included, she would later learn, the DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT INTEGRALS teacup, and nine others, each with a different message, each one chosen by him.
The teacups were not, however, what they discussed first.
What they discussed first was the door. He closed it. He locked it. He turned to her and she was already there, very close, and she put her hands on his chest, lightly, and he put his hands over hers, and she looked up at him and said, I am twenty-two, and I am an adult, and I am sure.
“I am sure too,” he said.
He kissed her. It was the second-first kiss of her adult life and the first-first kiss of his in a long time, and it was unhurried, and it was gentle, and it went on, and on, and on.
They did not have sex that night. They had sex the next Friday, on the green velvet couch, with the curtains drawn, with a great deal of conversation, with the question what do you like asked and answered twenty times from each side, with a great deal of laughter, with the teacups watching from the shelf.
What they did that first night was simpler. What they did that first night was lie on the green velvet couch with her head on his chest and his hand on her hair and the whole Tuesday between them, the calculus Tuesday, the chain-rule Tuesday, the blushing Tuesday, the almost-asked Tuesday, the asked Tuesday, the coffee-shop Tuesday, the door Tuesday, the kissing Tuesday, all of it, all of it, settled between them like a problem set with all the answers worked out.
“Stay,” he said.
“Stay where.”
“Here. Tonight.”
“On the couch.”
“Or in the bed. Whichever you want.”
“The couch is fine.”
“The couch is fine.”
“I’m going to stay on the couch tonight and not the bed because I’m going to stay on the couch tonight and not the bed because I want to do this slowly.”
“Slowly is good.”
“Slowly is good.”
His hand was on her hair. Her head was on his chest. The teacups watched from the shelf.
“I am going to fail your class,” she said, after a while.
“You are going to pass my class.”
“I am going to pass your class because you are my tutor and also because I am very smart when the person explaining the chain rule to me is touching my hair.”
He laughed. The laugh was the laugh from the ninth Tuesday and the laugh from the coffee shop. She thought, I am going to hear that laugh a lot more, and she was right.