Indecent: A taut psychological thriller about class and lust

Yes, I told her. And a few days later, I submitted my resume to Vandenberg.

Ms. McNally-Barnes settled herself on a desk, her supple stomach spilling like risen dough over her waistband, and continued. “Having appropriate student-apprentice relationships is essential to maintaining your authority,” she said. “There has been trouble here, in the past, with young women not knowing where to draw the line. Dean Harvey has tried in the past to ban female apprentices from the program, but you know: Only so many guys want to grow up to be teachers.”

Raj, sitting barefoot and cross-legged in his chair, sat up straighter. “And I’m happy to act as representative for that underutilized talent pool.” His sneakers and socks lay in a crumpled pile under his chair, and I turned away from the sight of his naked feet, as though he was openly picking food out of his teeth. Every time Ms. McNally-Barnes referred to us pointedly as “ladies and gentleman” he grinned widely, happy for the attention and for the novelty of being constantly differentiated.

Ms. McNally-Barnes pointed grimly to the packet on my lap. “Don’t let these boys think that you’re their friend. Never let them think they have a shot at a romantic relationship with you, oh no. The minute they stop seeing you as an apprentice and start seeing you as a woman, you’re in trouble.”

ReeAnn had taken out a notebook and was scribbling furiously. I peeked over at the page. APPROPRIATE CORRESPONDENCE ONLY, she wrote. Then, underlined twice: APPRENTICE, NOT WOMAN.

There were certain rules we had to abide by, Ms. McNally-Barnes explained: No stepping foot into a student’s dormitory room. No touching the students in any way. No allowing the students into your personal residence. No texting, calling, or messaging with any of the students, and emails were only appropriate if they were related to an academic matter. No relationships outside that of student and apprentice.

“I assume these rules all apply to me, too?” Raj asked, drawing attention to his maleness once more.

“These rules apply to everyone,” Ms. McNally-Barnes said, and I felt certain as she said these words that she was looking right at me.

_ _ _

Even after the Christopher Jordan incident, I thought I would do all right. The incident had been a small mishap—I stored it away in the same place as the memory of wetting my pants on the school bus in fourth grade and of vomiting outside the Town Houses my sophomore year at Buffalo State after trying weed for the first (and only) time. It wouldn’t be until I told Kip about the incident that the shame would dissipate. “That’s fucking hilarious,” he’d say, and I’d realize that this is why we share things—to transform those memories into tidy stories that are no longer ours alone to carry.

The night before my first class, I sat at my desk and planned a lesson. According to the course description given to me by my supervising professor Dr. Duvall—call me Dale, he had said in his email—the aim of Honors World History at Vandenberg was “to acquire a greater understanding of how geography along with cultural institutions and beliefs shape the evolution of human societies, tracing the development of civilization from the Neolithic Revolution to the Age of Industrialization.” I would begin my first lecture by defining culture and explaining how the development of tools influenced the culture of early humans. I would show them on a world map the sites where the remains of various hominid species and early humans had been found. I debated whether I would be able to talk about the distinguishing physical characteristics of Homo habilis, Homo sapiens, and—most titillating of all—Homo erectus without the class dissolving into laughter.

Of course, I wouldn’t be teaching entirely on my own yet, not for a few more weeks. I wished I could be more excited. Teaching is what I wanted to do after all; teaching is what I was supposedly good at. But instead I felt a strange sense of dread, one that felt larger and more threatening than simply standing before a classroom of teenage boys.

I lay my outfit out on my bed, a pale pink ruffled blouse I had purchased the month before from a department store—loose fitting, high in the neckline, consciously conservative—and a pair of shapeless gray slacks. Downstairs, Babs, ReeAnn, and the Woods twins were watching a TV show they all liked, something about random men and women being paired up to train a puppy together. I thought about bringing the outfit downstairs for the girls to approve. I could hold it up and joke: What do you guys think, too revealing? Maybe I could even watch the show with them for a little while. But I’d already washed my face, and I didn’t feel like covering it up with makeup again. Laughter rolled up the stairs, grating as a car crash, and I felt tired. I crawled into my bed, letting the outfit slip to the floor.

Through the wall behind my headboard, I could hear Chapin talking on the phone, her voice gravelly and soft and the words indistinct. I wondered how many people she’d slept with. I thought about calling my mom; I imagined her back home in Lockport in her gray terrycloth robe with the holes in the elbows, drinking a mug of Sleepytime Tea in front of the evening news with my dad snoring next to her and the TV volume turned up too loud. My mom and dad had waited to have children until later in life and now, as an eternal stay-at-home mom and a retired support services technician with high school diplomas, my parents simply wanted to rest. That involved attending the occasional Lockport town meeting, providing key lime pies for bake sale fundraisers, and never touching one another (a fact that didn’t strike me as strange until I started watching PG-13 movies and saw the way men and women in love were supposed to behave). I already knew what my mom would say: Put yourself out there. You’re going to do great. Everything is going to be okay.

I crossed the room to get the notes from my desk and returned to my bed. I sat against the headboard, the covers pulled up over my lap, an invalid awaiting visiting hours. “Welcome to Honors World History,” I said to the room. “I am your teacher, Miss Abney.”

_ _ _

It rained the next day, a cold damning rain, and the boys tracked wet footprints up the stairs and into the halls of the academic buildings. My hair was a crown of frizz around my face, and my ballet flats squelched with each step. “You must be Imogene,” said Call-Me-Dale when I walked into the classroom, coming around his desk to greet me.

I took his hand. “Nice to meet you, Dr.—”

“Dale.”

“Dale, right. Dale.”

Dale was tall and angular, with long, thinning hair pulled back into a ponytail, wild eyes, and a wide grin. He could have been thirty-five or fifty-five. He bounced on his heels as I set down my bag, a little kid with a secret or a full bladder.

“Now, Imogene, that’s an interesting name. Are you named for the daughter of King Cymbeline?”

He grinned as he asked this. I felt bad letting him down. “I’m sorry, who?”

His grin persisted. “Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Imogen is the princess of Britain, known for her moral purity, unable to be seduced by Iachimo, who bets he can woo ‘any lady in the world.’”

My skin felt hot. “Oh. No, I think my parents just liked the name.”

“Well, that’s fine, just fine. It’s a lovely name.” He winked, and I felt a thump between my legs; attraction was still sometimes indistinguishable from discomfort for me. “Now, Imogene. Tell me how excited you are.”

“Um—”

“It’s thrilling, isn’t it?” Dale swept his hand around the classroom, to the four neat rows of desks with hinged tops that lifted to store students’ books inside and the beautiful vintage world map that took up almost the entire back wall and the enormous bay windows streaming light from the courtyard. “Being here, at one of the most prestigious preparatory institutes in the nation, helping to shape the young minds of the future. It’s really something.”

It occurred to me that Dale might be gay, and perhaps that he was on drugs as well. It didn’t matter to me; I felt I loved him already nevertheless. This was a bad habit of mine, falling in love. A few days before, on my morning run through town, I had spent the better part of a mile trailing a guy with yellow running shorts, keeping just a few paces behind him. He had impossibly long, wiry legs and feathered brown hair, and I matched my pace to his until he suddenly veered off the path into the woods. I imagined us going on runs together in the morning, panting beside one another as we jogged through town, until we finally stopped at our favorite coffee shop to get egg sandwiches and kiss. On weeknights we’d lie in my narrow bed, legs entangled, and watch classic films (he’d been a film major in college, I decided, a Hitchcock aficionado), and on the weekends we’d go into the city to see art exhibits and eat ethnic food we’d never even heard of but wanted to try, and we’d take goofy pictures of ourselves that would hang in the West Village apartment we’d move into together to remind us, always, of how we first began.

I never even saw his face.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It is really something.”

The bell rang for third period, and the boys began to filter into the classroom. The first few entered in silence, choosing desks near the front. As the clock ticked towards the start of class, the rest of the boys filtered through the doorframe, chatting and laughing but still respectfully hushed. I watched as they settled in like eggs in a carton, so charmed that I nearly missed the exchange between the last two to enter.

“Sack slap!” jeered one boy as he whacked his friend up between his legs with an open palm. His friend doubled over as the slapper slid into the last available seat in the back row. “Dammit, Marco,” the friend scowled. It stunned me, this childishness; I hadn’t been there long enough to know that the boys I’d seen in the pages of the pamphlet—the boys I’d imagined marching in orderly lines and quietly sipping their soup—did not actually exist, at least not outside the eye of teacher supervision. I glanced at Dale; he hadn’t noticed the exchange, or at least willfully refused to see it. The behavior wasn’t hidden from me, however; I felt cool to not illicit censor, as though I was part of the joke.

“Greetings, gentlemen.” Dale took his place at the podium in the front of the room. “Welcome to Honors World History. Welcome to Vandenberg. Welcome to the first day of the rest of your lives.”

Someone let out a half-hearted whoop! from the back of the class.

“I am Dr. Duvall”—only I, the fellow adult, could call him Dale—“and I will be leading you this semester with the help of my assistant, Miss Abney.”

“Hello, Miss Abney,” a guy with a pink-and-green polka-dot tie intoned by the windows. His voice was mocking, insular.

I gave a timid wave to the classroom. These were not the susceptible, open faces of the elementary school students I was used to. One of the boys had a dark shadow of stubble on his chin. Another had an angry blotch of boils on his forehead. I’d wanted this, students old enough to reflect and respond rather than parrot back memorized information like trained dogs, but I’d forgotten that I was a subject they would reflect upon and respond to as well. Before the boys’ condemnatory eyes I felt as authoritative as a cup of plain yogurt.

Dale launched into a monologue about his career as a commercial artist, his experience in the military as a parachutist, his chihuahua/dachshund hybrid—a “Chiweenie”—named Maxine. The speech was craftily nonchalant, spoken as though off-the-cuff—I could tell he had been doing this, earning the respect of adolescent boys, for longer than he let on. He cursed in places—how cool, a teacher who says ‘fuck!’—and made theatrical pauses in others. He commanded the class like someone accustomed to praise.

As Dale weaved through the aisles passing out syllabi, I unzipped my rain jacket (realizing just then that I had never taken it off) and set it on the floor by his desk. I’d printed out world maps for the boys to mark with famous early hominid finds and their locations—Dale had said he would allow me ten minutes at the end of each of his lectures to do an activity with the students—but the printouts had become crinkled in my book bag. Shame tightened my throat—for my wrinkled papers, for my squeaky shoes, for my frizzy hair, for my inability to command this room and to shape the young minds of the future.

“Hey, Dale?” I asked, hesitantly at first and then louder, “Dale?”

He turned to face me, halfway down the third row. The boy in the polka-dot tie turned to his friend beside him and waggled his brows. “Dale?”

“Yes, Miss Abney?” The pointedness with which he said my name made me think that perhaps “Dale” was not how he was to be addressed in front of the students. The room shifted to face me, fifteen scathing sets of eyes.

“Can I run down to the copy room? It seems that, um . . .” I held up one of my crinkled worksheets like an apology.

“Of course, of course.” His grin returned, and with it I felt a rush of relief. Everything was going to be okay.

I collected my papers and squeaked down the hall. In the copy room, I smoothed the least-wrinkled sheet out on the photocopier screen and pressed the right buttons. The machine whirred to life. As the warm papers slid into the tray, I looked up and met my reflection in the window above the copier, checking to make sure my blemishes were still buried beneath makeup. I slid a hand over the frizz in my hair, the wrinkles in my blouse and noticed, as I did so, that my wet rain jacket had made my blouse go sheer, and that the outline of my sensible beige bra was on display for all to see, having become visible through the fabric.

I returned to the classroom and zipped my rain jacket back over my shirt. I took Dale—Dr. Duvall—aside to ask if I could just spend the day observing, as I wasn’t feeling quite ready to lead a lesson just yet. I spent the rest of the hour—dripping, useless—on a chair in the corner, while the boys cast sidelong glances at me, all of us wondering what exactly I was doing there.

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