The Professor

It was the September of 2007, and the Idiot was still periodically drunk dialing me even though our second and last date had taken place in July. I had met the Idiot on MySpace and, concluding that I was not going to meet anyone on there, I deleted the account and decided to spend more time on OK Cupid instead. I had created the account in May, but I'd done nothing with it. I now filled out my profile and uploaded a few pictures, immediately commencing to receive somewhere in the region of a dozen messages a day. Much like MySpace, most of these messages were wince-inducing. I edited my profile to come across as a bit nastier, and the influx slowed. After a couple of weeks of terrible emails, I decided that I'd have to do some hunting if I were to meet anyone interesting.

I answered a bunch of questions on the site to help determine the type of guys with whom it would match me. Then I used the search function to narrow down my results to nonsmoking atheists. I weeded a few out, and then . . . then I saw him. The Professor.

The Professor was a postdoc at UT, and he was damn near everything I was looking for. He was a scrawny pale guy with glasses and unruly hair, and he enjoyed science fiction and many of the same films I did. Better yet, he was British, he'd attended Oxford, he was seriously good at math, and he didn't have any embarrassing photos of drunken partying or any other off-putting nonsense. I discovered that this was because he did not drink at all. I would have preferred someone who drank occasionally, but I could live with it since, I reasoned, it was far better than someone who regularly got trashed . . . like, say, the Idiot.

Intriguingly, rather than post the URL to his website as I had with mine, the Professor concealed his URL in the form of a series of puzzles. I had to have him, so I ignored my total incapacity to handle anything mathematical and solved the puzzles. There was of course a fair amount of cheating involved, and it still took an embarrassingly long time, but I nevertheless located his website and sent him an email.

To my delight, he responded, and we began to talk online almost daily. Within a couple of weeks, he suggested meeting in person, at which opportunity I jumped.

The day of the date arrived, and I drove to the park and ride and hopped on the bus. As I sat on the number one headed toward the UT campus, I watched in dismay as it began sprinkling, which became a deluge by the time I deboarded at 24th and the Drag. I entered the student union and dried myself off in a restroom before moving over to the doors where we'd arranged to meet. I waited for a few minutes before phoning him, leaving a voice mail. He called back a minute later, complaining (in his delightful accent) of "getting a bit wet," which I knew perfectly well meant "soaked to the bone." He was still up at 29th street, so we arranged to meet at the RTF building at Dean Keeton and the Drag. I flinched at getting wet again, but I walked up there anyway. I stood under the overhang of the familiar (to me) ugly brown windowless building and waited.

The Professor arrived, and we exchanged greetings before entering the building to dry off. When we emerged, the rain had let up, so we went back to the student union as we had originally planned. We sat in one of the public lounges and talked—or rather, he talked; I babbled. The air conditioning quickly grew uncomfortably cold on our damp clothes, and we opted to leave.

"There's a Brazilian restaurant I like to go to near here," the Professor told me, describing a little place on Speedway. I had not heard of it, but I was willing to go. We crossed the campus and stood on the curb at Speedway, waiting for traffic to slow so we could cross. Apparently it was a game day of some sort (our unathletic selves were unaware of this), so traffic was quite heavy and showed no sign of letting up long enough to allow us to cross. I anxiously expressed a desire to walk half a block up to the traffic light and cross there.

"No, no; it'll be fine in a minute," he said. He placed a foot in the street. A Mack truck Dopplered past with a gale force draft. He placed his foot back on the sidewalk.

"Are you sure—"

"It's fine," he insisted and began to cross. Not convinced, I looked askance at a particularly ominous blue car up the street, its headlights glaring like a torture chamber and its tires hissing malevolently over the hot pavement from which steam rose in manner nastily suggestive of Dante's Inferno.

I concluded there was safety in numbers and dove after the Professor, though not without a noise of complaint.

We seated ourselves inside the Brazilian restaurant, which, the Professor said, was rather more crowded than usual, no doubt due to the game.

Despite not having eaten earlier in the day, I had lost my appetite (I was extremely nervous), so I only ordered a fruit cup and some other side dish. Naturally, I somehow managed to pop a grape out of the bowl, and it rolled across the table to the edge of the Professor's plate.

"Er," I said. The Professor stared at it for a second, picked it up, and placed it on the edge of his plate. I cleared my throat, and we continued our discussion as though nothing had happened.

We left the restaurant and walked to his house, ostensibly to look at some math art of his or something. I had seen this routine before and its predictable conclusion.

The Professor's house was a small, practical place near campus. He covered the walls in math art and had a Tetris bookcase in one corner. He showed me his computer room—I noticed a huge pile of papers scattered in one corner but, though at once curious and critical, did not comment—and then we returned to the living room and sat on the floor, looking through a few books. I leaned close, my face inches from his. He didn't appear to notice. I sighed and inwardly grumbled something about oblivious academics and absent minded professors.

It grew later, and I had a bus to catch. He walked me back to the Drag, where he had parked his bike earlier. We stood at Dean Keeton and the Drag and waited for my bus. Upon its arrival, he started to turn around to head home.

"Hey," I said, catching him by the arm. He turned back. I kissed him on the cheek. He laughed nervously and said good night. I shrugged to myself and boarded the bus.

The next day, we talked on instant messenger. I hoped for the possibility of a second date, but he did not feel the same way.

"I'm afraid you're in danger of becoming attached," he said.

" . . . "

He wasn't interested, nor had he ever been. I asked him why he had let me think it was a date when that had not been his intent.

"There's nothing wrong with meeting new people," he said. I felt he was still socially inept bordering on cruel, though.

The Professor and I nevertheless maintained a friendship. I invited him to see The Nutcracker with me when my coworker Freefall offered me two tickets. The Professor and I met at the theatre, but due to a mix up with the tickets, we were not able to see the show. Instead, we got some Greek food and then went to see The Darjeeling Limited at the Dobie theatre.

I nursed a crush on him for weeks, including through my brief relationship with the Security Guard and when I first met the One That Got Away. Then, though, the situation with the Electrician escalated, and I moved on. The Professor and I remained friends but only saw each other sporadically.

Some two and a half years later, the Professor completed his postdoctoral research at UT and began the next chapter of his life in Australia. He posted an event on Facebook announcing a going away party, and I wrote that I thought I could attend for about an hour but had to work later that night. The next day, he emailed me saying his girlfriend was helping organize the party and wouldn't appreciate seeing me there. That threw me for a loop—I didn't even know he had a girlfriend; why would a total stranger not want to see me? I figured the Professor was the one who really didn't want to see me and just didn't want to say so. Regrettably, him not liking me was a lot more probable than a total stranger's neuroses, unless the Professor had been dumb enough to tell his girlfriend about a single non-date three years ago. I messaged the Professor and asked if he were sure he weren't the one with the problem. He said he really didn't want to discuss his girlfriend, and of course I pointed out that we were discussing him, not her, which further clued me in that he was the one who didn't want to see me. He hedged further, saying that my presence at the party would be awkward since I wouldn't know anyone there. Determined to make him face the issue, I said I could still see him off in some way. He said he'd be busy with packing and such. Yeah, right; if you have time to host a party, you have time to see somebody if you want to. Eventually, he semi-confessed that it was his problem seeing me, not his girlfriend's. No shit. He referred to an incident of more than a year before, when I had gone to visit him during his office hours on campus one day when I was on my way home from work. He said he thought it was creepy that I visited him, even though I pointed out that he'd told me his office hours. No matter. He said "good luck with the theatre," which I interpreted as code for "have a nice life." I said "yep" and promptly deleted him from my Facebook and instant message contacts list. It was probably the politest "fuck off" I've heard, but that only made it all the more annoying. I mean, it's impossible to be polite when telling someone you don't want her at your party, so you may as well go all out. I would have appreciated the honesty instead of the transparent excuses and hiding behind his girlfriend, who probably wouldn't have appreciated being used in a such a fashion. I know I wouldn't want to be used as an excuse to break up a friendship. I began to wonder if the Professor even had a girlfriend.

On a hunch, I asked a friend to check the Professor's OK Cupid profile. In order to view his profile, one needed a log in, and I had disabled my account some time ago. My friend checked the Professor's profile and said the Professor was listed as available, not in a relationship. I suspected as much. Either he had no girlfriend and was lying, or, more likely, he did have a girlfriend but it wasn't that serious, otherwise he'd have listed himself as seeing someone. If she were really organizing his party, though, it probably was a serious relationship that he hadn't yet admitted to the world, which made him doubly douchey. "Go to Australia and good riddance, asshole," I remarked to a couple of friends I bitched to. "What a fucking immature tosser. Oh well; if there's any justice, his girlfriend will dump him for some awful AC/DC fanatic who looks like a parody of Crocodile Dundee. If Crocodile Dundee's knife is any kind of a metaphor, she'll be gone the second the plane lands. I hope she bounces like a kangaroo from one Aussie bed to another." I'm only a little petty.

Anyway. The moral of the story is, if you don't want to talk to someone, say so up front. Don't let that person think you're comfortable in a friendship when you're not. It only leads to more trouble down the line.

And another thing. Don't use other people as a shield for your own insecurities; there's no need to drag other people down with you.