"See anything you like?"
"Huh?" It took me a second to realize that Tekla had caught me looking down her blouse as she leaned over the table, and another second to become completely and paralyzingly embarrassed. "Uhhhh…."
But Tekla just laughed. "Oh, don’t worry, no big deal, I’m used to it. There’s a couple of boys in my class who spend half their time sneaking peeks. Can you believe it, at their age?" She laughed again. "And mine!"
Finally I regained enough composure to say "I guess they grow up fast these days," in almost my normal tone of voice, quickly wishing I’d been cool enough to say something teasingly suggestive — Yeah, there are a couple of things in there that interest me, being the best that I could come up with after much after the fact thought.
Tekla taught third grade and I taught fifth. We had both started at Saint Martin’s at the same time, had gone to the same college and were often thrown together, at first by necessity and later by choice, natural allies while navigating the treacherous shoals of classroom and staff meeting. A real affection grew between us, along with the unsettling shadow of sexual tension, inevitable with a man so appreciative of female beauty and a woman so blessed with it.
To me she was as attractive at forty as she’d ever been, graceful and confident, with the kind of bedrock beauty that transcends age. We were both married, happily enough on my side, and apparently her’s as well, although I would learn in time that that wasn’t quite the case.
Intimate, but never physically so, we’d confined ourselves to an infrequent collegial hug, carefully overlooking the fact that I was a man and she a woman, a difference that can be ignored indefinitely in theory, perhaps, but only for so long in real life.
Tekla didn’t dress as suggestively as the second grade teacher, with half her blouse undone, or as primly as the librarian buttoned to the neck, or even as comfortably as the principal in her St. Martin’s sweatshirt, but stylishly, very aware of the impression she was making, clearly feminine but never overdone, with her bracelets and earrings and thin gold chains, her usual outfit a simple white blouse and black slacks, but varied with enough dresses and skirts that it never seemed like a uniform.
I’d read an article by a female academic in one of the journals which asserted with complete certainty that being a woman in our culture necessitated the conscious, forced assumption of an artificial and dramatic femininity, an imperative to play the role as conscientiously as a drag queen. As is common with many theories, I believe that statement says more about the person making it than the ostensible subject – certainly, although she had an inherent understanding of posture and presentation retained from her ballet days, Tekla’s femininity came quite naturally to her, laying lightly at even the most unrehearsed moment.
Obviously I thought about her a lot, too much probably, her clothes, her hair, the way she smelled, the way she said my name, those intermittently revealed legs. I certainly didn’t want to call it love, and it wasn’t, not in the sense of some irresistible, crushing romantic force, but there was undeniably a very real sweetness there, the kind that made me willing to get out of bed each morning and continue going through the motions of what had proven to be a disappointingly meaningless middle-class, middle aged life.
But all that was prologue. Inevitably, even in the most predictable, pedestrian existence, lines appear that must either be crossed or completely avoided, and it was then, with that one question that, despite all that had gone before, our relationship really began. See anything you like? At that moment I think we both knew, for better or for worse, that everything between us had changed.
