Free Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun Page B

interest of describing a complicated situation as quickly as possible, I have left things unsaid and failed to examine certain aspects of the situation as thoroughly as I should.
    First of all, there is the question of the classroom.
    I described Nasreen’s reaction to my praise of her writing as “unflustered,” and so it appeared at the time. But of course it could not have been anything of the kind. When you have as much at stake as students do in these expensive, highly competitive programs, you are not going to be “unflustered” by your teacher’s enthusiasm, however confident you may be in your abilities. I know this from my own experience. I studied English literature at university. There were no creative-writing classes on offer, but my tutor was a well-known poet and one day I plucked up the courage to hand him a sheaf of my poems. He was reluctant to take them, but a few weeks later I received a letter from him in which he praised them and encouraged me to go on writing. His words had a powerful, really almost a shattering, impact on me, one symptom of which was that for a very long time I was unable to relate to him as a normal human being. Having never been daunted by him before (or no more than any student is by their tutor), I suddenly found it hard to talk to him. I became nervous and awkward. Every exchange between us left me feeling anxious that I’d said something crass or offensive that would forfeit his good opinion. By giving me explicit authorization to think of myself as a writer, he had become entangled in my fate, which in turn had imbued him—or, more precisely, caused my mind to flood its image of him—with godlike powers.
    So I have to assume, or at least admit the possibility, that Nasreen had in fact been highly flustered by my admiration and that, as with my tutor, the experience had transformed me from a teacher respected merely out of convention into a figure of heightened power, similarly implicated in her fate; similarly crowned, robed, and enthroned in her imagination. It’s hard, almost impossible, for me to accept that such a version of myself, so unlike my own version of myself, could really exist in anybody’s mind. But other than having to share the same physical appearance, there is no reason why other people’s versions of oneself should bear a complete or even a remote resemblance to one’s own. To repeat the words I myself quoted to Nasreen from George Eliot: “The last thing we learn in life is our effect on other people.”
    Next, there is the question of the “fiancé.”
    I had been struck by the word—the word itself—when she had used it, charmed by its old-fashioned aura, but I had given little thought to the drama of human embroilment it actually denoted. Even when the engagement ended, I had been more interested in her manner of disclosing the news (“I can’t marry A—”)—which had seemed to confirm my sense of her as someone who valued a certain reserve when it came to discussing personal matters—than in the news itself.
    What I didn’t consider, and no doubt should have even though I wasn’t being invited to, was that she might have been traumatized by the breakup. As far as I understood, she had been the one to end it, but maybe she wasn’t, and even if she was, she might well have been experiencing feelings of disappointment, failure, even the anguish of sexual jealousy that can afflict jilter and jilted alike in any breakup. People are always in various stages of various different dramas when you encounter them: freshly embarked on some, halfway or more through others. One is always approaching the denouement of this or that subplot of one’s life. And you, the stranger, entering the picture in all your blundering innocence, may well be the catalyst for some long-awaited climax, or the last in a series of minor but incessantly accumulating, and finally backbreaking, straws. Especially if you have done something to engage the interest of