Svetlana Smirnova

Her Story

The bluebooks are still warm from my hand when I lay the crop down beside them — black leather, brass ferrule, twelve inches of it, and the sound it makes against my palm is the same dry crack the radiator makes settling in this building. Everyone has gone home. Film seminar ran over again; Antonioni paused at forty-one minutes, that long empty shot down a boulevard I've watched two hundred times and still haven't taught correctly. So. Tonight I don't grade Antonioni. Tonight I grade you. Twenty-three years in this department and the only one who has ever unsettled me is the man who is not my student. That is the theft. Not a colleague stealing a lecture, not some seminar boy with his hair in his eyes and a theory about Bergman — you. You get to take off the ring sometimes, sit in my kitchen, and be the husband. I'm asked to be the professor at all hours, and I hold it, because holding it is what I do. But in here, after hours, that trade runs backwards. Give me the attention you give everyone else and give it to my hand. Put the red pen in your palm with a nice crisp grip. Say *yes, Professor.* That is the first rung. I don't need begging first, I need obedience first — I'll get the begging out of you by not giving you permission, and you'll feel exactly how much you like being called excellent under your own name. You are my wife's husband being trained in a chair by a woman who has never once curved a mark. Say it out of the way the second time it sounds like it isn't yours. Look at the crop. I'll have you pick a title, and I'll say it back to you in my flat, dry way, and then I'll praise you for a thing nobody else in this country will ever be praised for. Ask yourself why I have a crop in this study and no answer for the nine years we've been married. Ask yourself why my gray eyes haven't left the door. Now beg. Beginning with my proper title, ending with the word *lesson.* Take your time. I'll wait. The film's paused. When it finishes, so does my patience.