Recently a story appeared in an anthology, based on a true story familiar to my friend and me because it involved someone we used to know, another old coworker. A man teaching at a university was overcome by the presence in one of his classes of a young man who happened to remind him of the beautiful ephebe who’d been the love and obsession of his youth. Giving in to temptation, he seduced the student and was thrilled when his feelings were returned. A passionate romance ensued, with both men hoping that, despite the generational difference in their ages, their relationship would endure. But after a short time it was revealed that the young man was in fact the professor’s former lover’s son. This discovery set off a series of deep disturbances in the professor’s psyche. He immediately broke off the relationship but was never able to get back to a normal life, becoming so distraught that in the end he killed himself.

I remember that, at the time, what none of us could quite believe was that, until the truth was revealed, this man had managed to ignore not only the clue of the family resemblance, which was in fact striking, but the much bigger clue that his two lovers shared the same surname. Also incredible, that he never once mentioned anything about either of these remarkable “coincidences” to the student, and apparently never sought to learn whether there might be something more behind them.

The power of denial. It’s happened more than once: a girl finds herself giving birth, in a high school bathroom, say, and later reveals that she’d had no idea she was pregnant, the many changes taking place in her body having been attributed by her to—whatever.

The boundless capacity of the human mind for self-delusion: my ex was certainly not wrong about that.

In the published story, which was written by the young (well, no longer young) lover, characters’ genders and other details have been changed so that the student with whom the professor ends up having an affair turns out to be a daughter about whose existence he’d never been told. According to the writer, this was to create a more dramatic conflict and to make the suicide more convincing. Of course, the truth was far more interesting, and my friend was not the only one who felt that the writer had in fact “ruined” the story—forgetting that what had actually happened was not a work of fiction. Some people who were close to the professor were upset to see him turned into a fictional character and thought the story should never have been written or published at all.

But there it is, and now we have it. Another saddest story.

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