Tantalized

by Nenia Campbell

  I'm in such high spirits I don't really care. I can use the soap dispenser. My neighbors don't like it, they can call up the housekeeping service and demand a refill. All I know is that I can't wait until Professor Delacroix's next class. It's going to be a lecture that neither of us, I'm sure, will ever forget.

  The days pass by as slowly as dripping syrup. I hang my new purchases in the closet and go about my business, skipping classes by day and attending local parties by night. My mind is abuzz with possibility—I cannot wait for Wednesday to come.

  When it does, slowly, taking its sweet-ass time, I don the skirt and blouse with glee. I was so excited I had the energy to shave my legs for once without growing completely exhausted. The clothes don't look as good on me today as they did in the store dressing room and for a moment I consider returning them—I haven't taken the tags off yet—and backing out.

  But only for a moment. I'm feeling reckless and I've come this far, haven't I? I've only been looking forward to this day all week. This is the point of no return as far as I am concerned.

  I shrug on my leather jacket and begin the slow walk to school from the dorms. My doubts follow me, like trained dogs on leashes. I can hear their nagging footsteps in my wake. I hesitate before stepping inside the classroom, struck by something an awful lot like stage fright. Recklessness is nothing new to me, I have done many reckless things in my life, but this easily makes the top ten list, no problem. I've never tried to seduce an older man before. I have had older men try to hit on me, but that's different, passive—I didn't ask for that to happen. This is me taking total control over the situation, making my wishes and desires obvious, and I realize now that I don't even know whether Professor Delacroix is married or not.

  God, what if he has kids?

  No, somehow I doubt that. He doesn't seem like the father-type. I doubt he's the marriageable type, either, though if he is, it's unlikely that his wife's breasts look as good as mine do in this top. I can see he's wearing another one of those button-down shirts, baring a triangle of golden throat peppered with those curly dark hairs, and I know that I have no choice but to walk into his classroom and act blasé.

  Maybe too blasé. At first he doesn't even register my presence. I am wearing the leather jacket over the blouse. Even when I take it off it isn't readily apparent that I'm not wearing a bra because of the appliqued screening. Still, I expect some sort of reaction or acknowledgment on his part. This is fate in the making. Delacroix, oblivious, shuffles his notes, gazing off importantly towards the horizon as he plans his next words carefully down to the minute.

  I suppose it will be easier to draw attention to the fact that I'm not wearing underwear. I tug down the hem of my skirt with a little smile. Unless your thighs are practically glued together the whole time you're sitting down, it's almost impossible to sit decently in a short skirt facing an elevated platform. I can feel my bare ass cheeks sticking to the fabric of the chair, and yes, okay, that's a little gross. I feel sorry for the next person who unknowingly sits here, but not sorry enough to do something about it or feel repentant.

  Delacroix looks like a god from his podium. The light catches on the bristles that surround his mouth, make the dark of his hair shine with white heat. I smile up at him. You wanted to see me, Professor? Now you can. Am I everything you ever wanted?

  In my chest, my heart is a buzzing constant.

  “Humbert is an unreliable narrator,” he is saying. “Part of the genius—and the weakness—of first person narrative is that you only get one half of the story. In this case, Humbert's. In order to properly read and understand Lolita, you have to look at what's inscribed between the lines. As with negative space in art, the meaning can come from what isn't physically represented in the work as much as from what is.”

  Look at me, I order him. I'm here. Look at me.

  The scratch of pens on paper mimic my building frustration, and the crackle and sizzle of my nerve endings as they catch fire like dry twigs.

  Look at me.

  “Is Lolita asking for it, as H.H. would so desperately have us believe? Or is he a rapist fulfilling his own selfish desires? A superficial read might lead one to believe him to be the victim of a cruel and sociopathic child with a penchant for destroying older men. On the other hand, we know Humbert is an unreliable narrator from the get-go, and the assertions he makes for his innocence are chillingly similar to the defenses used by many perpetrators of rape and assault. That is—that she was asking for it.”

  I cross and uncross my legs in agitation, leaning back in my seat. The pull-out desk hits my arm, and with a muted curse, I push it back into the side of the seat. In the corner of my eye I sense movement and I am gratified to catch Delacroix in the act of a double-take. He has just seen—something. He isn't sure what.

  We have just reached a natural pause in his discourse, meant for emphasis. But it goes on for a second too long as his eyes linger on my naked thighs and the dark shadows that lie between them.

  There are stirrings as the other students murmur to themselves, wondering aloud whether they are actually expected to answer the question, or whether it was rhetorical. Professor Delacroix did say that he never took questions, didn't he?

  His eyes single me out at last. I smile up at him, lowering my crossed arms. His eyes drift down to my blouse and he bites his lower lip, looking for a moment as nervous as a teenage boy at prom. Imagination can be so much more tantalizing than reality, much like the negative space he was talking about earlier, but I decide to give him something to keep him up tonight.

  I pull down on the hem of my blouse, pretending to straighten it. For a moment my nipples slide out to press unimpeded against the tautly stretched lace. Delacroix coughs, clears his throat. There is a flush in his hollow cheekbones and I suspect rather strongly that he is perspiring beneath that dark wash shirt.

  “The truth,” he continues, scratching almost desperately at the stubble on his throat, “is probably a mixture of both.” His eyes meet mine over the lectern and narrow, making it clear what he thinks I am.

  “Your assignment for next week is to write a ten-page paper citing various passages in the book that lend credence to one view over the other. I want to know what you believe—who is the victim, and who is the perpetrator? If you choose to write from Humbert's point of view, I expect you to discuss in addition whether you think it is love he is feeling, or merely lust. You will turn in the paper on my desk before class starts or I will consider it late and dock the appropriate percentage accordingly.”

  I let my head loll to the side as he talks, regarding the fly of his khakis. They are loose enough to leave something to the imagination, but I wonder: is there a slight bulge in the crotch that wasn't there before?

  “You're dismissed,” he says, chillier even than the AC going full blast above our heads.

  He has let class out thirty minutes early.

  This is an unheard-of event, apparently, judging from the surprised looks being exchanged. Delacroix said himself that he planned his lectures down to the very minute—and now he's squandering away thirty of them? What's going on?

  From the look Delacroix sends me, which could freeze Pompeii mid-explosion, I have an idea. My lips curl into a satisfied smile. I can't believe it. He is sporting a bona fide erection in the middle of class. All because of me. And it was so simple, too.

  In history you learn about entire kingdoms crumbling into chaos because of a woman—or, in some cases, multiple women. I smile at Professor Delacroix, putting an extra bit of swing into my hips as I sashay out the door. I'm beginning to see just how easy it is to bring a man to his knees with a few flashes of bare skin, and the whispered promise of hot, sweaty sex.

  Really, it's not so impressive.

  That is the first time I enjoy the privilege of having the upper hand with Professor Delacroix.

  And though I do not yet know it, it will also be the last.

  I can count the number of lectures I've attended this week on
one hand, and most of those have been Professor Delacroix's. My two Philosophy classes are equally dull, made more so by Delacroix's oratory prowess, but I do pop into Introductory Psych to see how things are going. I attended the first class, which was a brief overview. Brief overview is teacher slang for 'cram the entire lesson plan into a single class period to see how many wimps drop the class.' And his plan must have worked, because the classroom does look significantly emptier.

  Fineman is talking about something called behaviorism, which I guess is the study of behavior. I never could have guessed that from the title, so good thing he's here to elaborate for us.

  “Behaviorism was one of the most popular schools of psychology in the early to mid-twentieth century. You might say that its hard science and revolutionary approach suited the zeitgeist of the times.”

  It's really quite sad. He looks so much like John Krazinski, and yet even that can't hold my attention. Not after sitting in a classroom with Delacroix for an hour and forty minutes, embroiled in that voice and body that just ooze sexual pheromones.

  “It stemmed from the belief that thought and action were generated by stimulus-response patterns and were almost entirely behavior-driven. Remember, behavior is something that can be observed, which means it is relatively easy to record and test. This was also quite a bit more appealing than the, um, relatively abstract and elusive qualities of mental processes.

  “Neuroscience has made gigantic leaps and bounds in the last decade, completely changing how we view the brain and its components. In the twentieth century, psychologists did not know as much about the physiology of the brain—partially because they did not have instruments that could, um, measure living tissue in action. The trending view was that the mind was a black box, which, in philosophy, refers to a concept that can be defined only by the actions it produces.”

  “Kind of like a gestalt?” someone asks, without raising their hand. I glance at the professor, expecting that congenial facade to disappear. But rather than looking irritated or threatening to expel the student forcibly through the double doors for daring to interrupt his meticulously planned-out lesson plan, Fineman smiles proudly and says, “Very similar. Good application of one of our previous concepts.”

  And the student beams like a lottery winner. Yuck.

  Fineman pauses to take a few more questions and comments before moving on. “If any of you, um, watch South Park, you may be familiar with the episode with the underwear gnomes,” he says, half-smiling. He clicks his remote at his laptop to giggles and muted applause—unlike Delacroix, Fineman is an enthusiastic devotee of Powerpoint—where he has Photoshopped a screencap of the episode in question.

  I squint a little, because I should be wearing glasses although I am far too vain to wear them. There are some little garden gnomes dressed in red and green. They are pointing at a sign mounted to what seems to be a cave wall that reads Phase 1: Cognition. Phase 2: ??? Phase 3: Behavior.

  From the laughter that greets this image I guess this is some kind of witty reversal of something that happened within the episode, but since I don't follow South Park or psychology his effort is wasted on me.

  I thinking I remember Fineman having pretty good ratings across the board. The comments were harsher, with some people saying that he stammered, which could be a little distracting. A couple others complained that he tended to geek out and go on long tangents that, while interesting, didn't really have much to do with whatever he'd been discussing before. All of these things are true, and it's too bad because I'm sure he's a nice guy, but something about that kind of makes me want to kick him when he's down. After the fifth time he says “um” I start keeping tally on the blank sheet of binder paper in front of me, thinking I could post my evidence on the site as testimony.

  Fineman clicks to a different Powerpoint slide and we spend the rest of the period learning about behaviorism, including operant conditioning (that is, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment) and classical conditioning (basically, Pavlov's dogs in action). This actually rings a bell—ugh, disgusting pun so not intended—and I'm pleased he's finally talking about something remotely familiar, though I guess you'd have to be living under a really stupid rock not to know about Pavlov.

  As I'm scratching down my fifty-seventh “um” tally mark on my paper, I get a genius idea. I can use this conditioning stuff to get Professor Delacroix to notice me during his class. I have to think about it for a bit, wait for the idea to crystallize, but then my brain does a mental finger snap. I'll wear my leather jacket every time I have something sexy and sheer on beneath it, and see how many lectures it takes his brain—either one of them—to make the connection.

  Fineman mentioned that the connections forged between associations are strongest when they are rooted in drives basic for survival. Apart from eating and sleeping, sex is one of the most primal, not to mention the most necessary. I doubt it'll take long.

  It doesn't.

  No, it doesn't take Delacroix long at all, and I love the way that he starts to be unable to take his eyes off me the moment I set foot in his classroom. Every time I take off my jacket, it's like I'm doing a strip-tease for him, and its just the two of us, alone amidst a class of hundreds. An island borne of lust.

  I'm wearing a sheer silk blouse and my tightest pair of jeans. The jeans aren't all that tight anymore, though. I haven't been eating much. I don't really have the time, and being around food always seems to make my stomach upset. Actually, my stomach's usually upset in general. I always feel sick. I don't mind, though; I like the way my hipbones feel, jutting out of my skin like an ocean jetty breaking through the surf. If I can see my bones, I know I have some. That's one less lie to worry about beneath the skin.

  Delacroix's one harried TA passes back the Lolita essays from earlier this week, calling out last names and waiting for the aforementioned individual to raise his or her hand. He's clearly not doing them alphabetically, else mine would have been returned first. I wait impatiently, thrusting my hand into the air when I hear my name. It does interesting things to my breasts, and I find myself hoping that Delacroix is looking my way. The TA seems to be. His hand shakes a little as he hands my paper back, and that reaffirms my new-found sense of power over men, of being able to bring them to their knees.

  On that subject, I took the view that Lolita was asking for it. Demanding it, even. I didn't explain why, though, since I wasn't interested in combing though my book to look for supporting passages in the text. She had to know the effect she was having on H.H. It might have been a game, whose consequences she was unable to fathom, and maybe she didn't deserve what happened to her towards the end, but then, they say you shouldn't play with fire if you don't want to get burned in the first place.

  I'm not very surprised to see that I've gotten a D-minus on my paper. It's circled twice as though the grader was surprised that anyone could sit through Delacroix's brilliance three days a week and completely offshoot the point. The grader appears to be Delacroix himself—I recognize his handwriting at the top—which amuses me, because he said he wouldn't be grading this weekly essays personally. Clearly, I'm the exception. I'm even more amused by what he's written. See me after class. His words are written in scarlet letters, with his office hours inscribed beside them in all-block capitals.

  So he's finally given in. I try to catch his eye. I want a glimpse, a glimmer, of what made him submit to me at last. He does not look at me, however, and will not for the rest of the lecture. Out of shame? Out of embarrassment? No, not that. Something else. But what? Whatever it is, it makes me feel like the victor, the proud conqueror. I've caused the professor of erotic literature to get shy around a real woman. I've found him out, called his bluff, and proven him a fraud, all in the same breath.

  I've won.

  …haven't I?

  Doubts immediately make their entrance, right on cue. That was a little too easy. I'm no Helen of Troy. I've been flashing my crotch and my breasts at him, and he reacted
the way I wanted him to, but what if it wasn't out of lust? What if I'm in trouble? What if he's called my fucking parents?

  No. I don't think he would do that.

  Something tells me that he's too proud to play the harassment card, too machismo and misogynistic to admit that a woman could get to him by wielding her sexuality like a weapon.

  By the time I walk up to his office I'm all set for a showdown. But Delacroix already has a student in there with him—a female student—and he barely glances at me. “Are you here for my office hours, too?” he says, in that voice of careful disdain. “I'm with another student at the moment, I'm afraid. You're welcome to wait in the hall.”

  Putting me in my place. Or so he thinks. I shrug my assent. Not all of us can be gracious in defeat.

  The other girl smirks at me. I make the peace sign and flick my tongue between the V, enjoying the look of disgust on her face. To complete the gesture, I raise my fist and slap my elbow at her, telling her “fuck you” New York style before storming back out into the hall to compose my game plan.

  I lean back against the wall and stare up at the air-conditioning vent. All the hairs on my arms are standing up. I can feel them bristling against the silky sleeves beneath my bulky leather jacket. Is it cold or fear? I feel like I'm on drugs, teetering on the edge of the abyss. One wrong step, and I could fall.

  And part of me wants to fall, just to see if I would survive, or shatter into a thousand jagged pieces.

  My concentration is shattered by a voice saying, “Thank you, Professor Delacroix.” She practically bows as she backs out of his office reverentially. “I've never thought of it that way, but I can see what you mean. Thank you so much for helping me.”