Loner by Teddy Wayne Page B

her, and leaned down to give her a peck on the top of her head. Her hair felt like crunchy grass on my lips.
    You were neither outside nor in the lobby when I arrived at the library at 9:05. I sat on the front steps, afraid you’d impatiently left, forgotten, or blown it off.
    With each passing minute I grew more convinced you’d shown up and departed when I was ensnared at CVS. Your paper was due tomorrow; I wouldn’t get another opportunity to work with you like this. I should never have agreed to go with Sara.
    You showed up nearly half past the hour.
    â€œSorry,” you greeted me, not looking all that apologetic. I suppose this was one of the privileges of being who you were: you didn’t have to care, because you knew I, or whoever was waiting, would be overjoyed simply to have an audience with you. Your cheeks were flushed from the cold and your hair was in slight disarray, like you’d recently woken up.
    â€œNo problem, I just got here.” I scrambled to my feet and opened the door for you.
    I proposed we go to the less crowded second floor. In the eventof a surprise visit from Sara we would be harder to find. If she did somehow see us, I would later tell her you and I ran into each other and decided to work together. The counterintuitive benefit of your preternatural beauty was that our meeting would prompt no suspicion, as it might have with someone closer to my weight class.
    We located an empty table in a secluded nook. You opened your laptop. My heart was thumping too fast. I tried to think of our meeting as a casual tutoring session and nothing more.
    â€œSo,” I said, taking out my copy of the James, “ Daisy Miller . What appeals to you about it?”
    â€œWhat Samuelson was talking about today was sort of interesting,” you answered. “The use of the male gaze.”
    â€œThe Mulvey essay,” I said encouragingly, and ventured a joke. “It’s great how much social progress the male gays have made lately. Pun in tended.”
    It took you a moment to separate the homophones. Then you let out a puff of air by way of laughter. It wasn’t the gag of the century, but it had done the trick.
    â€œWhich part of Mulvey’s argument resonated with you?”
    â€œTo be honest,” you said, “I read it, but I didn’t really understand it.”
    â€œSo, in film, the camera assumes the role of the scopophilic male eye,” I explained. “It objectifies the passive female characters, leering at their physicality, and the audience internalizes that viewpoint.”
    â€œScopo-what?”
    â€œScopo philic . It means deriving pleasure from looking, especially at erotic objects, sometimes to substitute for participation.”
    â€œOkay,” you said. “I think I have an idea for the paper. Do you mind sticking around while I write the beginning, to see if I’m on the right track?”
    â€œOf course.”
    Ten minutes later you proudly showed me what you had produced on the screen.
    In the novel “Daisy Miller” by Henry James the character Winterbourne is scopafilic when he looks at Daisy. He derives pleasure from looking at her beauty to substitute for participating in talking to her.
    It wasn’t just seven-hundred-page novels by dead white men; literary criticism didn’t seem to be your bag, either. But you were clever in other ways, I could tell ( veritas ), which must have been reflected in your Harvard application.
    â€œHmm,” I said. “You’ve got some good ideas here. I think you might be able to dig a little deeper, though.”
    You closed your eyes, rolled your neck back, and let out an audible sigh in anticipation of the hours of exertion ahead.
    â€œI don’t know how I’m going to do this in one night.” Your eyes opened and targeted me expectantly, hopefully. “Do you have anywhere to be? Would you be able to hang out and help me with the rest?”
    I