Myself on High

She had just won a major literary prize. She was slim, blond, and preposterously attractive. I was slim, blond, and preposterously awkward. Somehow I'd gotten into her poetry writing class as a first-semester freshman. I'd submitted a sonnet about a monk so consumed with sexual longing that he couldn't pray. The monk was me, and the poem, of course, was awful. But because I seemed to know something about formal poetry and because she herself was obsessed with God (the thing my speaker should have been obsessed with), she decided, I guess, to let me in.

Soon I was in love. That her criticism was blunt only fueled in me a certain masochistic tendency. Her comments on poems included "Not fit for a dog's breakfast" and "Grossly sentimental. Try sharing it with your family." I'd walk out of class in a daze. Once, I failed to pause before crossing the street and was nearly workshopped by a bus. The more negative she was, the more determined I became, arranging my words like long-stemmed roses in a vase. The most stubborn of florists, I vowed to win not only her literary regard but also her theological heart.

One day, she announced that she had bought the desk on which a famous twentieth-century poem had been written, and she needed a volunteer to help her husband retrieve it. My hand shot up, and though the word husband sounded an alarm, I pictured our future together. "Are you sure you're strong enough to lift it?" she asked in front of everyone.

I would have marched to her house right then, but she told me to come the following Wednesday. When at last I set out, my heart was racing. To calm myself, I hummed the hymn I had sung in church the previous Sunday:

There let the way appear steps unto heav'n;All that Thou sendest me in mercy giv'n;Angels to beckon me nearer, my God, to Thee.

As in a dream, the melody seemed to lift me up and deposit me at her door. "John, this is Ralph Savarese," my teacher exclaimed in the front foyer. Shaking her husband's hand, while looking straight at her, I said, "Nice to marry you."

Nice to marry you? Before I could process the slip, they were both guffawing. My beloved went down on her knees—she wasn't praying— and pounded the floor. I ducked into a powder room, gasping for air. I wanted to drop the class; I wanted to leave the university; I wanted, in short, to die. The powder room, I belatedly recognized, had no window and thus no escape. The husband had to beg me to come out. "Ralph, it's OK, really. Everyone falls for her," he said, still laughing.

At the end of the course, my poems, too, were humiliated. My teacher told me, "Stop writing. You haven't a lick of talent." But then, three years later, after I had turned to another writer on the faculty and after she had been assigned to read my senior thesis, she took it all back. "You're the only one I've ever been wrong about," she said in a note.

I couldn't believe it. I grabbed that note and ran all over campus, proclaiming my triumph. You'd have thought a DNA test had just cleared a murderer's name. THIS WRITER IS INNOCENT! THIS WRITER HAS A FUTURE! I then went back to my dorm and crafted a reply: at first, a rather effusive thank you, which I scrapped, followed by something uncharacteristically bold. The only one you've ever been wrong about? "Don't be so sure," I wrote with liberated fury.

Because she had preached the virtue of brevity, I left it at that— a single jab of the pen. Students who didn't relish proving an authority figure wrong, as I did, or who weren't like mangy, beaten dogs that keep coming back for more would probably have stopped writing after her initial discouragement. Who can say when talent will...