Our age difference, the Law Professor told me, was Socratic: seventeen years. An ideal gap for ideological instruction.
He had medium-sized children—concealed at twentieth-century-style boarding schools—and this made him seem experienced. Still, I wasn’t young. My breasts were beginning to sag, but I still slept with my stuffed animals.
The Law Professor had been young once, maybe even a Marxist. He told me there are only three kinds of stories in the world: war stories where the man dies for communism; love stories where the man dies for communism; I can’t remember what the third kind of story was.
He gave me a book of German fairytales and I found an old Polaroid inside of it: He looked to be about my age, wearing the same layered, mild-mannered clothes he always wore—a hoodie, a peacoat, corduroy. In the photograph, he was mid-sentence with his mouth open, smiling as if about to say something transgressive. I wanted to run toward this version of him. Suddenly I understood why he was so self-possessed, that the charm of his youth had lingered in his confidence, in the easy way he carried himself, and that this was the cause for his otherwise inexplicable sexual charisma. For men, growing old seemed to be less about atrophy and more about dilution, a gradual process of watering down some essential identity, becoming less of something. I could sense an old reactionary edge in his voice even as he defended the geriatric president and spoke about the importance of democracy, in the same way I could always sense that he had been excessively attractive in his youth. But I knew this charismatic approach to aging almost never worked for women.
After months of intermittent and degrading sex he agreed to take me to dinner. I met him at a bad steakhouse in Midtown, the sort of place that might have been stylish half a century ago. The point was that we wouldn’t run into anyone. I stepped in from the cold and folded my parka over my arm. I was wearing one of my grandmother’s mail-order prairie dresses because an Australian life coach on the internet had said: You have to amplify your femininity in order to make a man want to take care of you. The hostess gave me to the waiter and the waiter gave me to the Law Professor.
Did you know that J. D. Salinger and Joyce Maynard never had penetrative sex? he asked after our entrees arrived. I was on my third glass of wine.
I think I’ve heard of this, I said.
He didn’t want to spoil the perfection of her youthful beauty, he told me.
So she just gave him blowjobs, then? I responded.
I took a bite of rubbery steak and spat it out into a cloth napkin.
What is wrong with you? he asked. He signaled to the waiter for a second bottle of red wine. I asked for a martini.
Nothing is wrong with me, I told him. It just seems like a waste of a teen girl’s fertility.
I felt myself growing older in his presence, diluting, the currency of my youth collapsing. Without excusing myself, I stood up from the table and wandered the restaurant like a child until someone pointed me to the bathroom.
I sat in the stall staring into my broken touchscreen. When I scrolled down, tiny shards of glass made small incisions in my fingers. I opened Instagram and waited for the advertisements to load between the disappearing pictures of people I didn’t know anymore, eating in restaurants or attending weddings or consciously uncoupling. The sponsored content seemed more real than the photos of my old acquaintances, who looked like advertisements for themselves, for generational wealth, for the American psychiatric industry, for sex positivity.
I made a list in my head of things that I wanted: I wanted to meet someone new. I wanted a Hitachi Magic Wand and a man to tie me to a bed and leave me there to masturbate until I died. I wanted every product I’d ever seen in an advertisement.
The Law Professor sent me a text: Don’t come back from the bathroom. Someone from my department just walked in.
I felt a thin film of self-pity cover me like a second skin. These types of ritualistic humiliations had become part of my routine. I opened Twitter.
When I stepped out of the stall, I saw that I had been crying and that the tears had softened my makeup into a tasteful smokey eye.
At his apartment on the Upper West Side, we had perfunctory sex. I was drunk enough to risk guiding his hand to my throat, but he just left it there limply. He was from a different generation. He hadn’t grown up with the right kind of pornography. It probably didn’t occur to him that I would want to be choked but not killed. I felt alienated and lonely afterward, and he looked like he longed for his wife.
I woke up in a haze, unable to identify the sterile white room. I never understood why the Law Professor had this full life (wife, children, concubine, career) and yet his house was like a hospital. Everything was stored away in glossy white cabinetry—even his books were out of view in some container. Maybe this was a contemporary way to signal wealth: appearing to own nothing.
I laid in the Law Professor’s bed on my back pretending to sleep, staying very still, feeling no pain, trying to decide whether to shower before or after he defiled me again. I remembered the previous evening, how he had rolled over and reached for his phone as soon as he finished, how he had barely looked at me. It’s true that I have a technically perfect body, but I’m hopeless at sex and secretly conservative. Usually I just lie still and scrutinize the stains on the ceiling, hoping that the man will feel flattered by my passivity.
From behind my eyelids, it was possible to see the faint shape of the Law Professor, hunched over in his armchair and reading from a book about Hitler. I reached for my phone quietly. He liked quiet in the mornings. My finger was bleeding from swiping on the broken touchscreen. There was a small streak of blood on the Law Professor’s pillowcase. I wondered if anyone would notice it: his wife, his housekeeper, whoever. I sucked my thumb clean. I tasted doorknobs.
I started to respond to some text messages and then stopped, reached for my purse on the floor, and rifled around for a jar of skin serum whose label read AGE REWIND.
Stay in bed, the Law Professor said without looking up from his Hitler book. I like you so much when you’re sleeping.
Outside of the brownstone, it was a soiled white morning and cold.
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From Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy. Used with permission of the publisher, Catapult. Copyright © 2025 by Anika Jade Levy.
