knightley

In a department as small as the English dept at UM, any rumor of a good looking guy with a soft accent spreads quickly. And so for weeks I hunted for a glimpse of this person who could reduce hard-bitten feminist theorizing women to gushy swooning. For weeks I was denied – until the morning, running late to teach on the first day of class, I helped a guy figure out the copier in our grad student mailroom.

I stood behind him, looking at the clock on the wall, watching him purse his lips as he turned his book this way and that, watching as he pushed button after button and nothing happened. One after another, blank pages slid out the paper tray. This went on for nearly five minutes until, bursting with contempt and impatience, I stepped around him, punched the correct combination of buttons and glared at him in his tweed jacket and khakis. He smiled blandly, held out his hand and said, “I’m Kelvin. It’s my first day.”

Yes, he was cute (floppy brown hair, milk-like skin, big brown eyes) but I also thought he was a total incompetent for not knowing how to use a copy machine.

Then - one brisk gray November afternoon he wore a kilt, walked into Caribou Café during my office hours and time stopped. I was in the middle of a sentence and I swear I went deaf. Then I went clinically insane. I switched my office hours to Espresso Royale instead of Caribou; I discovered he had an office around the corner from mine; I figured out his teaching schedule; friends spotted him around campus, reported back to me and I slowly began to fill in the little black diary in my head. C—, a fabulously gay friend of mine, lived in his same apartment building and we both swooned over my abject of affection’s shabby preppiness.

(ha ha, I mean to write ‘object’ and wrote ‘abject’ instead. I think I’ll let it stick.)

We adored his kilt. We giggled at his floppy hair, his fisherman’s coat (blue wool with a hood, plaid lining and wooden frogs), his accent (that turned out not to be an accent). I filled two journals filled with KS miscellany – the quality of his voice, his clothes, his care of his students (he was a rather innovative teacher), his favorite beer, his favorite pen, his violin case, his hair. He had divine hair.

I was totally gone. Crushed out. Enamored. Irrational. Crazy. I could be surrounded by friends in the café and he’d come in and I’d feel it. My neck would tingle and it was as if all the air in the room had been sucked out. I felt demolished by him. After a year, a girl friend Jessica arranged my first conversation with him. He told a story about his family’s croft and I … can’t remember anything else except how the light of the café bounced off his glasses and hid his eyes. A runaway train could have crashed through the café and I would have died happily underneath the wreckage.

(have I mentioned I was a virgin at the time?)

My friends were willing to be my eyes, but they wondered why I was so dazzled. L—was exasperated with my willingness to be a passive rag; J—was puzzled because he was so bland. J—once described him as a cardigan wearing bird with a broken wing. Eventually, 2 years later actually, my crush turned into disdain, I got rid of my nagging virginity, and I moved to Chicago.
…
Today, after my companionably silent lunch, immediately after my last post, I googled him. For some reason his name was in my head after being absent for years and I googled him.

And there he was. It was like a kick in the head.