Page 2 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

But the day he handed back our first papers, Mark asked me to stay after class.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m enrolled,” I said.

“No,” he said, “this paper.”

I saw now he was holding my essay in his hands. I could see it had an A written on it in red pen, but I pretended to be worried. I’m not sure why. “Was the paper not good?”

“No, the paper was excellent. I am asking why are you at Fullerton junior college. You could go anywhere.”

“What,” I said, laughing, “like Harvard?”

“Yes, like Harvard.”

“I don’t think they let you into Harvard for writing a good English paper.”

“That is exactly why they let you into Harvard.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Would you like to get coffee sometime?” he asked. “We can talk more about this.”

“Yes,” I said. I had no idea yet that he was interested in me. It didn’t occur to me at all. He was married, he wore a ring, he was in his late thirties, old enough that I didn’t think of him in that way. But even if I’d known his intentions, I still would have wanted to go for that coffee.

He was my professor, and for some reason this mysterious title made him slightly nonhuman. In the beginning it was hard to imagine that I might hurt his feelings or affect him in any way. I did not make moral judgments about him either. I accepted him as he was, as though he had earned the right to be dorky and odd and adulterous by being better and smarter than other people, better and smarter than me. Mark seemed as whimsical and mysteriously useless as the city of Fullerton itself.

Fullerton wasn’t really any richer than where I’d grown up in Downey, though it had a completely different vibe because of the colleges: Cal State Fullerton and its little sister, Fullerton College. In Downey, you could eat overpriced seafood in a dark restaurant pulsing with techno or wait in line for an hour to eat Instagram-worthy sweet rolls from Porto’s. Fullerton, by contrast, was like an entire town run by maiden aunts. It had so many dentists and tax advisers you’d think people did little else. Even the frat houses seemed quaint and harmless, shaded by mature elms. Fullerton’s money didn’t come from industry. It came from its connection to learning, the colleges reason enough to keep the rents high and dollars flowing. Mark was a part of all that. He was a wind chime in human form, dangling dorkily from the glorious tree of higher education.

In the beginning, this made me feel like the power dynamic was in my favor. His professor-ness didn’t blind me to his foibles: I registered fully the ridiculousness of his pants (green! corduroy!), his shoes (Birkenstocks!), the thumbed-through copy of Beowulf peeking out of his messenger bag (messenger bag!).

But it was almost like I was a character in a book to him. He couldn’t get over it, the Kermit tattooed on my hip.

“Why Kermit?” he asked, the first time we slept together, rubbing Kermit’s little green body with his fingertip.

I shrugged. “I wanted to get a tattoo. Everything else was, like, knives or snakes or serious things, and I’m just not a serious person.”

“What kind of person are you?”

I thought about it. “A cheesy person.”

“Cheesy!” he barked.

“Yes, cheesy,” I said. “What, like, I believed in Santa until I was twelve. I don’t know, I’m cheesy!”

“You are the most singular person I have ever met,” he said wonderingly.

It was part of why I avoided ever telling him about my father. There are people who venerate professional wrestling and people who look down on professional wrestling, and I worried Mark would be the kind to venerate the thing he looked down upon. I knew my carny-ass bloodline would be an instant fetish for him.

The faker things seem the more intrigued we are by them—that was what Mark loved about point of view: the ways it was obviously fake or tried so hard to be real, which was, weirdly, another way of showing how fake it was. “The way you look at something changes what you see,” he said.

It’s true that writing in third person helps me. It is so much easier to have sympathy for the Margo who existed back then rather than try to explain how and why I did all the things that I did.

The thing about Bodhi’s dad that was so confusing was that of course I only slept with him because he had the power, of course it was the fact that he was my English professor, my favorite class. And yet so much of what compelled me was the way he kept insisting that I had the power. Which one of us actually had it, though? I used to spend a lot of time thinking about this.

Aside from impregnating me and kind of ruining my life, Mark helped me a great deal with my writing. He went over every sentence of my papers with me, touching on each one and how it could be better. He would give me A’s, then demand I rewrite the papers anyway. “What you are,” he said, “is too important not to polish.” He would point out a sentence I had written, demanding, “What were you trying to say here?” And I would tell him, stuttering, what I had intended, and he would say, “Just say that. Don’t pussyfoot around.”

It was only after he’d been helping me this way for several weeks that the affair started. One day, I was supposed to go to his office. When I got there, he said he couldn’t focus and could we meet another day, and I said sure. But then we wound up leaving the building at the same time and that turned into going on a walk together, and he vented about everything, all his frustrations about the department and his wife and kids and how trapped he felt by his life. “And I don’t even deserve my shitty life,” he said. “I’m a horrible person.”

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