It's a very thought-provoking short story. It's 'Travesty' by Lillian Fishman, published in The New Yorker on May 4, 2025. It explores the concept of a 'forbidden' romantic relationship, how it's viewed as morally corrupt, and in today's terms, 'sexual politics'. It talks about moral pressure, and how young people manage that.
Narrator Prima is an undergrad major in philosophy at Columbia, on the brink of adulthood and grappling with her identity and decisions as an adult. She becomes romantically involved with a professor, Eugenia Heiss. She thinks that her classmates know of the relationship, and kept their distance from her. Ruth, is Prima's friend, who seems to act like a moral compass with her leading questions.
Professor Eugenia Heiss taught a module on marriage. She spoke about the deceptive monolith of marriage. Prima was fascinated by Heiss's concepts and thoughts, her voice and her energy. Her relationship with Heiss began a month after the semester ended, and was pretty much taken off-campus. Heiss would visit Prima at her apartment.
“Marriage” was a word, like “motherhood,” like “betrayal,” that seemed to Prima to belong thoroughly to adulthood and to contain inexhaustible intellectual riches. It was one of the great excitements of adulthood to realize that marriage was not always just a response to expectation and convention, as it had been for her parents; marriage could be a complex, intimate architecture, an institution through which all the responsibility and power of adulthood might be expressed.
However, Ruth, together with a Thalia Campbell in the background, quizzes Prima on difficult thoughts about Heiss. Ruth asked if Prima knew about Heiss's history with students, her indiscretions, especially one Anne Lucas. Ruth thought Prima needed 'rescuing'; she wanted Prima to talk to Anne Lucas and see that Heiss is a predator. Prima didn't think she needed that. She wanted to define her own concept of love. And not be just a name to be pitied like Anne Lucas.
Then she hung out with a schoolmate Fernanda, and heard about Nicole Mangoula, a girl before her, whose relationship with Heiss ended badly and felt manipulated. Now, Prima begins to think deeper. She wrote Heiss a love letter, intending to deliver it via the faculty boxes at the English department, but she ultimately didn't. She ditched that and wrote a simple note instead, addressing Heiss as a teacher rather than a lover.
She asked for the first time, aloud, standing by the door to her apartment, a spot from which she had not moved in an hour, Why did Anne and Nicole wish they’d been protected? What had happened to them with Heiss? She shook her head. They were not her. She was not in a system; she was in a relationship. She had read enough to know that one day, in some way or another, she would feel that she had been tricked, even if not at Heiss’s hands. This would happen to her! She hoped it would happen to her—she hoped that hers would not be a sheltered life. In this surge of feeling, Prima became aware of how alone she was. She was alone in her studio apartment in Harlem. She could not believe that only the previous night she had been in Heiss’s apartment, in Heiss’s bed, and that she had felt completely fused with Heiss. In a way that she did not understand, and that had nothing to do with Ruth’s implications, she now felt strangely abandoned by Heiss. Why was it that Heiss was not going through this with her? Why had Heiss not been frank with her about how hurt Anne and Nicole had been? Why had Heiss not confided to her the pain of being accused of these abuses, and said to her, You and I know that we are in love, you and I know that you are a woman in your own right?
Perhaps Heiss had been afraid that, if Prima knew that Anne and Nicole felt mistreated, she herself would become distrustful. If so, Heiss had underestimated her in a manner that caused her more pain than any of the conversations she had had on this bleak day. She sat in the high-backed chair in her kitchenette. She unlaced her shoes and pulled them off. If Heiss had not confided in her, it had to be because Heiss considered her too young or too fragile to comprehend this wretched history in its context. Did Heiss think that she was just like Anne and Nicole? Did Heiss—loving her, touching her, enjoying her—throughout all this imagine that someday she, too, would rebuke Heiss for the distortion of her sense of love, and the theft of her innocence?
Prima decided to end the relationship because she couldn't find an equilibrium with how Heiss is treating her, versus how Heiss treated Anne and Nicole. This relationship between Prima and Heiss ended within three months. As a reader, I have no issues with Prima's decisions, whether to begin a relationship with Heiss or to end it. What's important to me personally, is that Prima found growth and illumination in that process, and didn't get hurt badly. She was also independent-minded enough to make her own decisions.
So travesty. The word came up twice in this story — the first time in a comment and shock that Heiss was still allowed to teach after all these 'known' and badly-ended relationships with students, and the second and final time uttered by Heiss who told Prima that she shouldn't be blaming the former for her own decisions that she can make as an adult. Well.
Heiss stood up beside her. It’s a shame, Heiss said, for you to talk to me about teaching, about power and trust and betrayal, as if you believe that you and Anne and Nicole are children in my care, and as if I’m like a father who convinces you that the dirty things I like to do are for your own good when you’re too small to know better. I did not take you from your crib, and certainly not from your dorm. It’s a travesty that you insist on thinking of yourself as a child, when you have a woman’s mind, a woman’s freedom, a woman’s body. I didn’t know that you thought of yourself that way. Forgive me, Heiss said, spitefully, with a down-curled mouth. Heiss took the waxed coat from the chair and pulled it on. From a pocket of the coat Heiss removed Prima’s note and her ribbon and tossed them onto the counter.
This short story is drawn from a novel in progress. The author decided that 'Travesty' is a chapter, and it follows Prima. In an interview, the author was asked,
Do you know already how it fits into the rest of the book? Is Prima the protagonist of the narrative throughout?
In my first attempt, this book was about a former student and lover of Heiss’s reëvaluating her experience in retrospect. Then I wrote a draft mostly from Heiss’s perspective, in which “Travesty” was the only chapter that followed Prima. It took me a long time to recognize that the question of how a student-professor relationship will seem in retrospect is actually most acute and threatening for the very young person who is being warned about how she may someday feel. It’s more harrowing for Prima than for someone older, like Heiss, who can contextualize it. The book in its current form is almost entirely about Prima, and about the frustration she feels—a frustration that I experienced, too, at Prima’s age—about how and when she will be taken seriously as an adult. In a certain way, it’s a privilege to be allowed to make reckless or naïve decisions and regret them.
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