“It’s a kind of performance, of course, all teaching is pretending; I had stood before them as a kind of poem of myself, an ideal image, when for a few hours every day I had been able to hide or mostly hide the disorder of my life, hide most of all the hunger that disorders most, and if I hadn’t succeeded entirely with Z. I had almost succeeded, if he had seen glimpses of what I was he had never until tonight seen me fully. I had leered at him, I had touched him, I had been a caricature of myself, I thought, but that isn’t true; I had been myself without impediment, maybe that’s the way to say it.”
—Garth Greenwell, “An Evening Out”