To Love Your Teacher is a Marvelous Thing

When I was getting my M.F.A. at the University of Oregon, my generous fellow fiction-writer Terry O’Neal introduced me to a writing teacher she adored who taught at Oregon State. Every week, Terry would drive the two us us from Eugene to Corvallis to take Ehud’s class.

I loved Ehud. I loved his writing, his teaching style, his New York attitude, his face. His first book was called What is it Then Between Us and it was a book of stories I wish I had written. Once Ehud called me on the phone and asked if I could get him some pot. I wasn’t used to getting phone calls from him, and I didn’t smoke pot, but I tried to act like this was an everyday occurrence and I told him, Sure. Of course. 

He didn’t mention money, and I didn’t have any because it was the end of the month and my stipend didn’t arrive for a few more days. I sold my camera at a pawn shop and got a twenty-dollar bag of weed from a friend of a friend. I don’t remember giving Ehud the baggie. I don’t remember if he paid me back. I just remember that my beloved teacher had asked me for something and I got the job done. That felt really good. I remember thinking that my stories must be okay because Ehud thought I was cool enough to know where to buy pot when really my routine was to go to the drugstore Friday nights with my boyfriend and pick a cold medicine to high us to sleep.

Decades later I heard he was reading from his latest book in San Francisco. I knew he had a terminal illness, and I decided to go to the reading even though it looked like my face had been on fire which, sort of, it had. My friend, an aesthetician, practiced her peels on me sometimes, and this one, it turned out, had been a doctor grade, much stronger than she had intended. 

I’d had a trip to Boston planned to visit my family that weekend, but my skin was so burned it was almost black in places and so I stayed home. But I decided to go to Ehud’s reading because he was going to die and I had to show up. 

In the elevator on the way to the reading, a little boy looked at me, started to cry, and buried his head in his mother’s skirt. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really wanted to come to this reading.”

I sat in the back row and watched Ehud, thin, fragile, cheekbones and teeth, read his work. At one point he looked up and it seemed like he saw me but had too many questions and so quickly looked away. 

After the reading, I waited in line for him to sign my book. When it was my turn, he looked up, exasperated. The last time I’d seen him look at me this way was when I went to his office at the end of the school year, the end of the program, to show him my engagement ring.

“Is that what you really want?” he’d asked.

I don’t remember what I’d said. In another life he would have grabbed me and kissed me and said I would not marry anyone on his watch, but not this time. He had a wife, a child, an ex-wife even. It wasn’t even that I wanted to hug him, kiss him, I just wanted his words inside of me, his talent, his knowledge of Flannery O’Connor and Isaac Babel. I wanted to be as convinced of my talent as he was—he believed in me as a writer, and I know this because he’d told me I was special. I don’t care if he told everyone this. I only heard him say it to me.

To love your teacher is a marvelous thing.

What is it then between us? 

He said once during a reading at the U of O, “I know that story was bad because even Anne had her eyes closed,” and I protested to him and to the crowd: “I was listening.” 

I handed him my book for him to sign. I pointed to my face. “I’m sorry,” I said. 

“Are you okay?” he asked. 

“I’m fine.” I waved my hands around, not sure of what to say. He was dying and I’d had a bad peel. My problems were ridiculous. “I just really wanted to be here.”

He signed my book. 

When you love someone more than they love you, many things are awkward, including good-byes. There was a line of people waiting with books in hand to be signed. I was another person who had wanted something from him, another fan. 

“You’d better be writing,” he said as I turned to go. 

Student love feeds teachers, keeps them alive. And our teachers kick open doors others tried to hammer closed.

https://www.nereview.com/2016/05/03/ehud-havazelet-1955-2015/